Dr.
Wen Chen was born in China at the end of the Great Cultural
Revolution. Being victims of the horrific atrocity that killed
two million intellectuals and destroyed traditional Chinese
culture, Wen's parents had mixed feelings about her education.
Despite their discouragement, Wen eventually won a national
prize at a science competition when she was 16. Hence, she
was accepted into a top university for undergraduate study. In
1994, Wen came to the U.S. for graduate school and received a
doctorate degree in Biology at the California Institute of
Technology in 2000. Because of her personal experience of being
brainwashed in China, she devotes her personal time to be a
voice for the voiceless by giving over 200 presentations to
community organizations since 2012. Her most popular topics
include "The Renaissance of Chinese Culture" and "Human Rights
Movement in China." Wen has been working as a scientific staff
for Caltech since 2000. She lives with her husband and two
teenage daughters in Pasadena.President for the Day: Steve Day
Nat
B. Read ia the author of
Don Benito Wilson:
From Mountain Man to Mayor
Los Angeles 1841 - 1878. This book tells the early
history of Los Angeles, and more generally California and the
West. Benjamin Davis Wilson was one of the most significant Los
Angeles pioneers, yet most Southern California natives have
never heard of him. Don Benito Wilson.
He owned Westwood
and started the predecessor of USC. He also owned Beverly Hills,
large parts of downtown Los Angeles, the City of Riverside, the
port area and the Western San Gabriel Valley. He set up American
government here locally, was the mayor of Los Angeles, county
supervisor and state senator. He was president of the first
railroad in Los Angeles and, with Phineas Banning, formed the
port here. He was one of the largest vintners and citrus growers
in the U.S.
Author Nat Read is an author and a speaker
who has spoken to over a hundred Rotary clubs here and abroad.
In his varied life he has been a captain in the Navy, a reserve
street cop with LAPD and a stand-up comic, performing at the
Improv and Comedy Store.
Don Benito Wilson:
Mountain Man to Mayor tells the story of the West and Los
Angeles through a single notable figure, who was born during the
lifetimes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and who died in a
Los Angeles that present-day citizens would begin to recognize.
Wilson lived to see an urban core of telegraph lines, street
lamps, brick buildings and street car rails in the street.
Through this remarkable life we see the existence of fur
trappers and Indians in the vast, vaguely-mapped West and we
learn of life in the tiny, dusty Mexican pueblo called Los
Angeles, with its roving packs of dogs and its bull and bear
fights. We see a post-Gold Rush American village that was the
wildest of wild West towns, the most dangerous city in U.S.
history, a town whose murders among its few thousand souls were
roughly the same number as for today's Los Angeles County of ten
million people.President for the Day: Diane Good
Dr.
Stan Stahl has been at the forefront of information security for
nearly 40 years: *Securing the nation's defenses in the
Reagan White House, Cheyenne Mountain, and our nuclear weapons
arsenal *Delivering Information Peace of Mind to Business and
the Nonprofit Community as Founder and President of
Citadel Information
Group, a leading LA-based information security management
services company *Providing cybersecurity leadership to Los
Angeles as Founder and President of the nonprofit,
SecureTheVillage.
Stan received
his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from The University of Michigan.
A frequent speaker on cybersecurity, Stan is regularly quoted in
the media on cybercrime, cyber privacy, and information
security.President for the Day: Mike Newman
Jonathan
Thomas ("JT") has been Chair of the governing Board since June
2011. Prior to that he was a Co-Founding Partner at Saybrook
Capital ("Saybrook"), an investment banking and private equity
firm based in Santa Monica, California.
Long interested
in the biological sciences, JT majored in Biology and History at
Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude. As a George C.
Marshall Scholar at Oxford, he then earned a PhD with a medical
focus in Commonwealth History. He subsequently returned to Yale
for a JD at the Yale Law School. While there, he retained an
involvement with biology by teaching courses on the legal
implications of genetic engineering and the impact of disease on
history.
He went on to be an investment banker for
Ehrlich Bober & Co. (a top-10 Wall Street public finance firm)
where, among other things, he led a team that underwrote over $1
billion in various kinds of bonds for the Los Angeles Community
College District. He left Ehrlich Bober in 1990 to co-found
Saybrook. While with Saybrook, he led an early round of
financing for Advanced Cell Technology (now Ocata Therapeutics),
which now has two embryonic stem cell-based clinical trials in
progress.
In addition to his financing expertise, JT
brings legal expertise to help CIRM navigate clinical trials,
bilateral collaborative agreements, intellectual property, loan
agreements and other legal challenges that confront CIRM on an
ongoing basis. His legal experience includes clerking for White
House Counsel Lloyd Cutler in the last year of the Carter
Administration and also for the Honorable George Mackinnon of
the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit. He later practiced at Munger, Tolles & Olson
in Los Angeles.
JT also has a broad knowledge of
governmental agencies, having served for seven years each as
either member or vice president of the City of Los Angeles Board
of Harbor Commissioners and as a member of the Governing Board
for the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority. In that
latter role, he developed a plan to finance the $2.4 billion
expansion of the Corridor rail lines from the Ports of Los
Angeles and Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles. Through this
government work and his many years in public finance, he has
served at various times as underwriter, financial advisor and
issuer of a wide range of tax-exempt and taxable bonds.
JT has worked closely with political officials at the federal,
state and local level on a variety of projects for over 30
years. He was the chief government liaison to the Governor and
State legislature for the Official Committee of Unsecured
Creditors in the PG&E bankruptcy, for whom Saybrook acted as
financial advisor in their Chapter 11 proceedings. He has
structured a number of public/private partnerships, including
the financing for the Dolby (formerly Kodak) Theatre in
Hollywood, home to the Academy Awards.
JT has a
long-standing commitment to patient advocacy. He spent more than
15 years on the Board of the Crippled Children's Society of
Southern California and served as Chair for four years. The
organization, now called AbilityFirst, assists children with
spinal cord injuries and mental disabilities that could be
targets of stem cell therapies. He is an Honorary member of the
AbilityFirst Board.President for the Day: Tom Barron
March 5 - Investment Advisors' Day
Steve
Scherer will bring together the club's best prognosticators on
investments. Always a great program - don't miss it!
The
son of
Stefania Podgorska and the steward of her story. Through
preserving and sharing Fusia's story, Ed's mission is to engage,
inspire and empower people to believe that they do matter, that
they CAN make a difference.
Rotary is a leadership organization
made up of local business, professional and civic leaders who meet
regularly to get to know each other, form friendships and, through that,
get things done in our local community. Rotary is the world's
oldest and largest service organization (founded in 1905).
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Dr.
Wen Chen was born in China at the end of the Great Cultural
Revolution. Being victims of the horrific atrocity that killed
two million intellectuals and destroyed traditional Chinese
culture, Wen's parents had mixed feelings about her education.
Despite their discouragement, Wen eventually won a national
prize at a science competition when she was 16. Hence, she
was accepted into a top university for undergraduate study. In
1994, Wen came to the U.S. for graduate school and received a
doctorate degree in Biology at the California Institute of
Technology in 2000. Because of her personal experience of being
brainwashed in China, she devotes her personal time to be a
voice for the voiceless by giving over 200 presentations to
community organizations since 2012. Her most popular topics
include "The Renaissance of Chinese Culture" and "Human Rights
Movement in China." Wen has been working as a scientific staff
for Caltech since 2000. She lives with her husband and two
teenage daughters in Pasadena.
Jonathan
Thomas ("JT") has been Chair of the governing Board since June
2011. Prior to that he was a Co-Founding Partner at Saybrook
Capital ("Saybrook"), an investment banking and private equity
firm based in Santa Monica, California.
Steve
Scherer will bring together the club's best prognosticators on
investments. Always a great program - don't miss it!
The
son of 
