Graduates Abroad

By Michael Rogers

As international collaborations in business and science have become commonplace and the Internet has made the world seem like one big switchboard, Caltech faculty and administrators have been encouraging the Institute’s students to go global and explore other countries. In a Caltech News interview earlier this year, Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau emphasized the need for students to have “meaningful” experiences with other cultures. “What you want to offer students is enough time to appreciate other cultures and discover for themselves how people in other parts of the world act, think, and behave, and how they might approach and solve problems differently.” And this spring, Caltech’s Faculty Board approved recommendations by the Committee on Exchange Programs and Study Abroad (CEPSA) to create more opportunities for students to study in other countries.

While these efforts will affect current and future students, Caltech graduates already have a unique opportunity to experience the world through the Watson Fellowship, which basically allows new graduates to immerse themselves in projects that range from luge building in Europe to the art of mime in Indonesia. Since 1973, 38 Institute graduates have had the opportunity to travel the world on Watson Fellowships to explore those and other intriguing subjects.

“While Caltech students often choose to attend Caltech because it offers in-depth opportunities to pursue scientific or technological interests that they are passionate about, the Watson allows them to pursue personal or academic interests (or combine both) outside of the structure of a university environment,” says Lauren Stolper, director of Fellowships Advising and Study Abroad at Caltech. “This freedom and opportunity to travel abroad while pursuing something they have a compelling interest for and involvement in forces Caltech recipients of the Watson Fellowship to push the envelope of their personal and intellectual comfort zone.”

Earlier this year, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation announced its latest crop of Watson Fellows, and two Caltech seniors were among the 50 undergraduates selected by the program. Jean Sun ’07 plans to study the bioethics of health-care distribution in urban and rural areas. Her itinerary includes the United Kingdom, Switzerland, China, and South Africa. An avid musician, Issac Garcia-Muñoz ’07 will spend the year in Spain and parts of South America looking into the history, construction, and sound of native musical instruments.

Sun and Garcia-Muñoz have a special connection to the Watson Foundation. In its most recent rotation of directors, all of whom are themselves former Watson Fellows, the Watson program picked a Caltech alumna to run the foundation. “It’s the most extraordinary program,” says Rosemary Macedo ’87, who was named executive director last year and who traveled to Antarctica for her Watson Fellowship 20 years ago. “You get to spend a year doing anything you’re passionate about. All you have to do is send us a two-page report every three months and five pages at the end.”

One of the most prestigious post-undergraduate fellowships, the Watson Fellowship program—started in 1968 by the family of IBM cofounder Thomas J. Watson, Sr.—chooses up to 50 graduating seniors annually to spend a year outside the United States in “independent, purposeful exploration.” Participants are given $25,000 to pursue their projects, which take them all over the globe. For many students, the Watson experience is pivotal, changing their career path.

Macedo says that the foundation tends to shy away from applicants who are looking to spend a year doing research in an overseas lab, although scientific pursuits that take inquiring minds into the field are welcome. “Are you interested in medieval castles? Is there some burning question you’d like to explore? The Watson is a year of personal growth,” Macedo says. Under the program, a select group of institutions, including Caltech, annually pick three or four nominees, who must write a proposal and go through an interview process. This year the foundation reviewed 179 nominations from 47 schools that considered more than 1,000 applicants. “This program is for serious scientists as well as for those whose passions lie elsewhere,” Macedo says. “Participants have to challenge themselves and love what they’re doing.”

Scientists at Sea

Rosemary Macedo, at right, moved from the world of high finance last year to take the helm of the Watson Foundation, 19 years after embarking on her own Watson Fellowship to distant places around the world, including Antarctica.

In Macedo’s case, she loved science, but also was an experienced rower and sailor. She found a way to combine these interests by embarking on a Watson Fellowship involving international scientific cooperation in oceanography.

After traveling through parts of southeast Asia, the Sargasso Sea, and western Europe, Macedo secured a berth on a German research ship headed to Antarctica. She boarded the ship in Argentina in December 1987 and spent three months at sea. “On that ship there were Germans, Swedes, Austrians, a New Zealander, and me,” she says. “Some were geologists mapping the seafloor and others were biologists looking at underwater life. I was on the ship most of the time but also visited different bases. It was all thrilling. But in some sense I had a tame Watson because I was mostly hanging out with scientists.”

Macedo ended her Watson year in South Africa, where she got a completely different view of international relations. In contrast to its role in Antarctica, the international community was actively discouraging scientific collaboration with the nation’s apartheid regime. “I think it’s important to note that I compared and contrasted two examples at the opposite ends of the spectrum: South Africa during the apartheid era, under economic and cultural boycotts which urged international scientists not to cooperate with South African scientists, and Antarctica, the ‘continent for science’ under the Antarctic Treaty System, where international cooperation was a specific goal.”

After returning from her fellowship, Macedo briefly worked as an optical engineer, but soon took a job in finance and eventually became a top-rated fund manager of an international equity fund without ever having taken a finance course. “I found that I really liked it. You get instant feedback, compared with science, which is interesting to learn but so laborious to practice. With the stock market, every day you either win or lose.”

When the Watson Foundation notified its alumni that it was looking for a new executive director, Macedo decided to apply. She was hired and left her investment job in the San Francisco Bay Area in March 2006 for the New York–based foundation. Her colleagues didn’t understand why she would quit the high-flying world of finance and take a big pay cut to run a small fellowship program. “It’s not about the compensation for running a program,” she says, “but about the program. I spend every day with the most fantastic people all over the country. I meet with applicants and alumni, as well as with college presidents, faculty, and liaisons at outstanding small colleges all over the country. I’m typical of a Watson. We don’t follow predictable paths. We do what challenges and satisfies us personally.”

The Magical Medical Tour

One of Caltech’s new Watson Fellows is Jean Sun, above.

Caltech’s two new Watson Fellows are passionate about both their studies and their extracurricular pursuits. Jean Sun, a double major in biology and English, has a strong interest in medicine and poetry. (She recently won all three of Caltech’s McKinney writing prizes, including the poetry prize.) She also can’t seem to say no to Caltech community service opportunities: she chaired the Board of Control, which oversees the Institute’s Honor System, and at one time simultaneously served on seven different committees. She decided to apply for a Watson Fellowship so that she could get practical experience learning about the difference in health care between urban and rural communities before applying to medical school.

“I thought it would be cool if I could work on medical policy for a year and do it outside the U.S.,” says Sun, who was also awarded the Frederic W. Hinrichs, Jr., Memorial Award at commencement, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to campus life and her qualities of leadership, character, and responsibility. “The Watson is perfect because it’s so flexible.”

Sun will first travel to Switzerland in August to read up on health policy, primarily at the World Health Organization, before going on to Shanghai. Although she was born in Boston, Sun spent four years of her childhood living with her grandparents in China before returning to the United States, where her parents—who both have medical degrees—were starting careers. Sun has relatives in Beijing, but the Watson program discourages fellows from relying on family ties, so she will spend two months accompanying doctors and visiting clinics in Shanghai, before traveling inland to the city of Chengdu in southwest China to visit clinics in rural areas.

Working through the Chinese branch of the Red Cross, Sun also hopes to assist doctors making emergency calls, a task that should be made easier by the fact that she is a certified emergency medical technician. “I want to do more than observe,” she says. “The Red Cross has an emergency response team that goes to remote areas, so I’ll be on call. They said, ‘Once you get here, we’ll put you in some training and you’ll go.’”

After four months in China, Sun will head to South Africa to spend two months in Cape Town followed by two months in rural areas of the country. Her plan is to accompany doctors on their rounds in hospitals and clinics in the city before going to villages with the Institute for Field Research, which runs a variety of volunteer programs. Sun will end her Watson year in London and the English countryside, observing the health-care system in a modern industrial country.

Sun’s own medical plans are to get both an MD degree and a master’s degree in public health. She expects to spend the early years of her career treating patients, and to eventually concentrate on health-care policy issues. “What’s most important in the end is the doctor-patient interaction,” she says, so having that clinical experience should be an advantage when making policy decisions. “The point of my Watson is to see doctors working in different environments. But it’s also to get used to being in unfamiliar situations and adapting to them. For whatever you do, that’s important.”

Traveling to His Own Tune

New Watson Fellow Issac Garcia-Muñoz, shown strumming his guitar outside Ricketts House.

Like Sun, Issac Garcia-Muñoz is interested in connecting with people, but his medium is music. Born in Mexico City and raised mostly in Southern California, Garcia-Muñoz started playing the violin in fourth grade, and although he’s never had a private lesson, he has since become proficient in several instruments, including the acoustic and electric guitars, the electric bass guitar, and the drums. Garcia-Muñoz eventually realized that he didn’t have the talent to be a professional performer, but with an interest in science he found a way to pursue music at Caltech as an electrical engineering major, learning about audio circuits and digital audio signals. He has also worked the sound board at numerous Caltech events, and during the summer after his sophomore year, he got a job at Acoustic Engineering Associates, a Pasadena company that specializes in microphone manufacturing.

Now Garcia-Muñoz’s Watson year will give him the chance to get to the roots of music. He’ll spend 12 months tracing the history of musical instruments in Spain and South America, documenting manufacturing and playing techniques through interviews that he will conduct and recordings that he will make along the way. On his first stop, Barcelona, he plans to meet with luthiers (makers of string instruments). “I hope to gain insight into the craftsmanship that goes on while building lutes, violins, and guitars, as well as learn their history,” he wrote in his Watson proposal. He also hopes to study flamenco guitar in the country where it originated.

In September, Garcia-Muñoz will travel to Chile, where he plans to get a firsthand look at guitar making and learn about Andean music, studying the history and manufacture of various traditional flutes and a tiny, 10-string guitar called a charango. He says his interest in Andean instruments was partly sparked by a Chilean folk band that performed last year in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. “Hearing them was a powerful experience that reminded me why I want to pursue music engineering as my career,” he wrote.

After spending the fall and winter in Chile, Garcia-Muñoz will head to Argentina to study that country’s folk music and possibly to perform himself. He hopes to end his Watson year in Guatemala, where he will work with a design group to create his own instrument. “I have no idea what kind of instrument I’ll make, but with my experience with string instruments, it will probably be of that nature.”

Garcia-Muñoz’s future plans include going to graduate school for a master’s degree in electrical engineering, with a specialty in music engineering, and then going into industry. He hopes to eventually develop new acoustics technology that can be used by performers and sound engineers, and, of course, himself. “Music gives me energy and helps me express my emotions,” he says. “I can do that better than using words.”

In the Line of Fire

Jennifer Low relaxes by Lake Kivu, which straddles the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

If the experience of previous Watsons is any indication, Sun and Garcia-Muñoz will likely return from their year abroad with many dramatic stories to tell. In 1990, the year she graduated from Caltech, Watson Fellow Jennifer Low went to the central African nation of Rwanda for a firsthand look at how the nation was dealing with early stages of what would ultimately become a widespread AIDS epidemic (it is estimated that today 11 percent of the nation’s population harbors the infection). This project was sobering enough, but at the time, she had no idea that she would also find herself embroiled in a political crisis that would ultimately engulf and nearly destroy the nation’s Tutsi minority population four years later.

Low’s original plan had been to study how the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, spreads in a heterosexual population, and she flew to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to work with an outpatient clinic, affiliated with UC San Francisco, that went by the name of Projet San Francisco.

“I wanted to spend time in Rwanda to make connections with the AIDS community and environment, hoping to compare and contrast treatment in Kigali with a European country such as Belgium,” which had colonized Rwanda, Low says.

But she had no sooner arrived at the airport than the clinic’s director, Susan
Allen, met her with the news that the government-controlled press was reporting that Uganda had invaded Rwanda and that the Tutsis were mobilizing to overthrow the nation’s Hutu-led government. Low was staying with Allen, and a few nights after she arrived, a group of researchers studying mountain gorillas near the Ugandan border took refuge in Allen’s house.

That night, Low awoke to popping noises. The leader of the gorilla researchers, who was sharing her room, said, “I don’t suppose they’re playing Ping-Pong.” They quickly concluded that bullets were flying, and Low and the others crawled on the floor to the central hallway in the house where they listened all night to the shooting. “Occasionally you could hear bullets hitting the house and mortar shells going off. It was scary. I thought, ‘I’ve only been here for three days and I’m gonna die here and my parents will be so upset.’ For four days, we stayed in the house the entire time. The shooting and mortars were mostly at night. We could hear lynch mobs roaming the streets.

“There was lynching and killing but at a lower level than in 1994,” she says, when gangs of rampaging Hutu, goaded by their government and a conspicuous lack of outside intervention, butchered about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the span of barely three months. In retrospect, the 1990 turmoil was probably touched off by Rwanda’s government, which used the rumor of a Tutsi offensive as an excuse to murder Tutsis still living in Kigali. Low and her companions managed to stay out of the line of fire until a convoy from the U.S. embassy eventually drove them to the airport where they boarded a Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi.

At the time, Low wasn’t sure what was happening in Rwanda. “I called the Watson Foundation saying, ‘I’m giving my money back and coming home because I don’t know what to do,’” Low says. “The Watson people were wonderful. They said, ‘We want you to be safe. You have all your options open. Think about what you want to do.’”

Low decided to stick with the program. She spent two weeks in Nairobi and then flew to Singapore where she lived with an aunt and an uncle for three months, researching AIDS education in the island city-state. By then, the situation in Rwanda had calmed down, and she returned to Projet San Francisco in January 1991. She concentrated on a subsection of the AIDS work involving women with cervical cancer, which, like AIDS, is caused by a virus.

“HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) and the cervical cancer virus, HPV, are both transmitted sexually, so the question was whether HIV-positive women developed more severe cervical cancer because they had both viruses for a long time, or whether the immunodeficiency associated with AIDS made them less able to fight off cancer, or whether something about the AIDS virus itself made cervical cancer more aggressive,” Low says. While most of her work was clerical, she also spent time accompanying women to hospitals for outpatient surgery. Although she knew that the hospital would fall short of the standards of a typical American facility, the situation was worse than she had expected. “The operating room looked like an elementary school cafeteria,” she says.

“Basically we’d go and camp out at the hospital. There were people hanging out and waiting to be seen. Eventually they’d do the procedure. There wasn’t very good anesthesia—only just enough to keep the patient under. Unlike American operating rooms, these had windows. That made it harder to keep sterile. There were concrete floors that had to be hosed down. There was nothing disposable, unlike in the U.S. At the end of the procedure, I’d help the person back in the car.”

Low’s time in Africa ended almost as dramatically as it had begun. She contracted hepatitis A in May and returned home to recuperate. In August, she entered the MD/PhD program at Georgetown University, focusing on tumor biology, and eventually went to the National Cancer Institute, specializing in breast cancer. She oversaw drug trials for a variety of cancers, and last December, she joined Genentech, the biotechnology company, as associate medical director, serving as the main clinician for some of the new cancer drugs that the company is developing. Along the way, she also married her Caltech classmate and boyfriend, Dean Brettle ’92, who stays at home to help raise their two children.

From her Watson experience, Low says she’s gained “a greater appreciation for other cultures. Seeing a whole different aspect to health-care delivery broadened my perspective. Part of it was an experience that added to my confidence and self-esteem. It certainly made me a more interesting person at cocktail parties. I had already decided to be a physician, so the Watson didn’t affect that. But when I started medical school, I felt I had a different maturity than those who went right from college.

Shutterbug of Borneo

Joe Francis, at right, spent much of his Watson year photographing the flora of Borneo’s rain forest. He also witnessed massive deforestation.

For many Watson alumni, the fellowship constitutes their first chance to travel extensively outside the United States. But Joe Francis ’87 was already a seasoned traveler by the time he got to Caltech, since his father had worked overseas as a consul general and director of the Voice of America in the State Department. “My first birthday was in India,” says Francis, who majored in computer science at the Institute. “Once you travel a lot as a kid, it’s hard to shake.”

Besides travel, another interest that had engaged Francis since he was a child had been orchids, although he had only seen them growing in pots. He also had studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena while he was at Caltech and was photo editor of the student newspaper, The California Tech, his senior year. The Watson Fellowship provided Francis with the opportunity to combine travel, orchids, and photography. “I wanted to see what it would be like to see orchids in their natural environment and to photograph them. So, on my Watson application, I said that I wanted to go to the jungle in Borneo and hunt down wild orchids.”

His proposal was accepted. and in August 1987 he found himself in Kota Kinabalu on the north coast of Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sabah. There, he hooked up with an organization that was focused on sustainable development. “They gave me an apartment and I helped them with computer stuff.” When he wasn’t in the office, he’d go on orchid-seeking excursions, often accompanying the organization’s staff on their field trips.

In his search for wild orchids, Francis climbed Mount Kinabalu twice. At 13,435 feet, it’s the third highest mountain in Southeast Asia. “To go from sea level to ice level is fairly dramatic. You see all stages of the rainforest on the two-day hike, from lowland rainforest to cloud rainforest, where it rains constantly, to high rainforest, where there are dwarf trees, to moraine, where there are no plants.”

Francis says he photographed “tons of orchids,” and “to see them in vivo, where their amazing color stands out, illuminates why horticulture works the way it does. You see fine differences that you’d never think about if you just grew orchids at home.”

But he also downplays the idea that the rainforests he saw in the late 1980s were typical of the “National Geographic view, with strange animals and wild plants.
Rainforests are extremely monotonous. They’re dark at the ground level, the trees block out the sunlight, and everything is the same shade of green.”

While there were no encounters with lions, tigers, or bears—none are native to Borneo—he had a grisly experience while hiking in a swampy area. He had been walking for several hours in thigh-high rubber boots when his feet began to feel squishy. He ignored the sensation for a while, figuring that it was caused by perspiration. But when he finally took off one boot, blood poured out. A leech had managed to crawl under his clothes and lodge in his groin. “That’s when I realized, it’s time for a hotel room,” Francis says.

On another hike, his attention was riveted by a crunching sound under his shoes. Francis, who had not been paying attention to the ground, finally “looked down and saw that I was standing in the middle of a 20-square-meter area that was solid with giant millipedes crawling all over. I kept walking, though a little faster.”

His adventures were tempered by the fact that much of the rainforest was rapidly succumbing to the depredations of logging. “You haven’t seen deforestation until you’ve seen the destruction of truck-sized trees sliced down as far as you can see in all directions,” he says.

“I went to the library there and looked at statistics of logging and figured out that the island would be out of trees by 2002. Even if they started planting then, they couldn’t grow back fast enough. Now 80 to 90 percent of the rainforest is gone.” He figures that the only reason his projection for zero trees by 2002 hasn’t been realized is that government agencies and international organizations have established a handful of protected areas.

Francis had originally planned to attend graduate school at the end of his Watson year, but his experience overseas altered his plans. In 1990, he moved to Paris, where he joined a commune on the Left Bank for three years, working with video artists and doing music research at the Pompidou Center. He then took a more conventional path and went to work for an information technology company, living first in Germany and then in Scotland, before returning to the United States in 2000 to work for Compaq Computer Corporation in Houston. He helped manage the business operations of the company’s industrial clients and eventually helped streamline its merger with Hewlett-Packard. In June 2006, Francis was named chief technology officer of the Supply-Chain Council, a Washington, D.C.–based consulting firm, where he keeps busy helping businesses scale up their operations to expand overseas

Water Worlds

Rebecca Adler stands with a group that gathered around her while she was collecting water samples in George, Zambia.

Caltech’s most recent Watson alumna, Rebecca Adler ’06, says that she’s been interested in science policy since the seventh grade, when the cloning debates first became news. A double major at Caltech in biology and the history and philosophy of science, Adler interned at the U.S. State Department for George Atkinson, Colin Powell’s science and technology advisor, during the summer of 2004, and quickly became convinced that science policy can have as much effect on the world as scientific research.

For her Watson, Adler decided to focus on water policy in the developing world. First, in July 2006, she went to London, where she pored over original records and documents in the British Library and the National Archives to investigate the impact of British colonialism on water policies in South Africa and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). In August, she traveled to Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, to work with individuals in a water-resource management group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which she describes as a large think tank with labs.

While in Pretoria, Adler chose to focus her research on mine-water related issues, since she found that the economy of so many developing nations is so heavily based on mining. “Gold mining displaces large quantities of water each day, polluting ground water, modifying the water table, and causing sinkholes,” Adler says. “When mine water is not managed properly, it becomes a very visible issue that can severely impact human and environmental health.”

Adler spent several months visiting operating and abandoned mines, talking with farmers, attending conferences, reading documents, and meeting with government and mine officials to understand mine-water issues and the role of science in developing policy solutions. She wrote two reports for the CSIR, published a paper in the Economics of Peace and Security Journal, analyzing the water and mining issue, and, in February, met with the minister of the Department of Minerals and Energy to present her analysis of the relationship between the government, the mining industry, and science over time. “Additionally, I suggested how the government could strengthen policy frameworks to leverage new water-treatment technologies to better address issues.”

Adler left South Africa at the end of March and spent the next month in Zambia, looking into water-quality issues related to the nation’s copper mining and rock quarries. She then visited Australia, spending time in thr Hunter valley, a coal-mining region. After finishing her year in India, looking into mine-water policy and mine-closure guidelines, she will start graduate school this fall at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health Science, where she will be a Hopkins Sommer Scholar.

Although Adler has discovered that not many people in Africa have heard of Caltech, she says, “I’m grateful I went to Caltech. It’s provided me with a great background in science that I’ve used to my advantage during the fellowship. In South Africa, I feel like I really got to know the culture and the history and that I was able to make a valuable contribution through my work and influence the way South Africans view mine-water management and mine closure.” As for the Watson experience, she says, “It has given me a lot of confidence. Additionally, the experience of being away from familiar surroundings enabled me to see things differently and to gain more appreciation for my life in the United States.”