Board

More about the Board Members

Esther Wojcicki is a long time educator at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, California. She has a B.A. in English/Political Science from University of California Berkeley, a Master's in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, and a Master's in Educational Technology from San Jose State University. She was a writer for Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times before going into teaching. She has won multiple awards from Teacher of the Year 2002 from California State Credential Commission to Special Recognition for Excellence from Society for Professional Journalists. She has been teaching in Palo Alto since 1984 and has built the journalism program from a small program into the largest journalism program in the U.S. with 400 students and five publications. She is married to Stanford Professor of Physics Stanley Wojcicki. They have traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America and are dedicated to helping children and young people in the developing world.

Cristina Ballerio holds an M.D. degree from the Universita' degli Studi di Milano ('82) and a specialty in Radiology/Radiation therapy from the National Cancer Institute (Istituto Nazionale per la Cura dei Tumori) in Milano ('87). She moved to Palo Alto in 1983 and did research at Stanford Hospital and consulting in the field of diagnostic radiology. In 1991 she decided to stay home and raise her three children and contribute to their schooling, sports and personality development. During this time Cristina held many parent volunteer positions within the Palo Alto Unified School District, where she was one of the founders and the treasurer of "Palo Alto Foundation for Education-Kids count". Cristina has traveled extensively around the world and was so deeply moved by the condition of youth in Africa, especially Mozambique that she has decided to put her time and experience to work for the benefit of children in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Dr. Vittorio Fossati-Bellani has over 30 years management experience in the opto-electronic industry. He has worked at Coherent Inc, as Chief Marketing Officer, and President of Semiconductor and Telecom Groups. In these roles he provided strategic, marketing, and general management leadership which helped make Coherent a worldwide leader in its field. More recently, Dr. Fossati-Bellani, has provided consulting services to technology companies in the US and abroad. He is now Vice President at Pyrophotonics, a Canadian start-up developing novel laser technology. Dr. Fossati-Bellani is now applying his international experience to help social cooperation in developing countries.

Radhika Shah holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley. She has been in executive/senior management and leadership roles for over 10 years in the software industry. She founded VirtualSynaptics, a cognitive matching company where she led the product and engineering teams, drove business & product strategy, and established partnerships in her role as VP Products and Business Development. She was part of the initial teams at GreenBorder (Google), Oracle's security products group, and BroadVision where she architected some of the first online-community and personalization products. She has worked at SGI, Sun, IBM (Almaden), and Indian Space Research Organization (Image Processing & conceptual Mapping). She is a founder of RajeevCircle, a group that hopes to continue the spirit of Stanford Prof Rajeev Motwani by helping others without expectation of returns and is mentoring a few social ventures that are trying to help people in underdeveloped parts of the world.

Jan Jannink has been a researcher at Toshiba and at IBM, before being involved in every technical role from consultant to CTO in internet startups such as MySimon, Gigabeat, Napster, imeem and Centerd in the past decade. He concurrently finished a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 2001. He founded imeem.com in 2003 to build community around rich media, and imeem has since grown into the most successful independent web based media service. He has helped raise over $30 million dollars in venture funding for his companies, and is currently advising and investing in about a dozen early stage startups. Jan has written a book chapter, journal articles and conference papers in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Database implementation and Knowledge base integration, and is preparing to teach a course at Stanford in Scalable Web Development in 2010. With help from family and friends he is starting a non-profit organization, raising twin daughters and loving life despite a tough economy.

Enza Sebastiani is an independent filmmaker and multimedia artist with a passion for nature, cinematography, theater, music, traveling and photography. She produces documentaries, music videos and corporate videos in the United States and in Europe. Enza is a full time QA Engineer with the Consumers Applications Team at Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California. She also worked as an independent contractor for other companies in the Silicon Valley. Her latest project, SFO-FCO-SFO is a cultural Podcast featured on her website www.sfofcosfo.com, in a documentary trailer format. Enza has great experience in both realms -- art of filmmaking and technical knowledge of digital video and how the two can be combined.