Portland State Magazine Winter 2017

WINTER 2017 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 27 P S U A L U M N I A S S O C I A T I O N FOR MORE ALUMNI NEWS follow us @PSU_Alums on Twitter and PortlandStateAlumni on Facebook. Have news you would like to share? Email a lum@pdx.edu or mail your information to Portland State University, Office of Alumni Relations, PO Box 751, Portland OR 97207-0751. To submit your own alumni news online, go to pdx.edu/alumni/contact . Dennis King ’70 retired in September when he closed his downtown restaurant Veritable Quandary. He opened VQ in 1971 and employed fellow PSU students. King sold the building at Southwest First Avenue to Multnomah County, which plans to build a new county courthouse at the location. Donna Darm ’77 was appointed to the Pacific Salmon Commission in November by President Obama. Darm is an administrator for the West Coast Region of the National Marine Fisheries Service. She lives in Seattle. Diann Owen ’86 was named a mortgage lending manager at Oregonians Credit Union in September. Oregonians is headquartered in Milwaukie. Vickie Schray MS ’90 was promoted to executive vice president of regulatory affairs and public policy at Bridgepoint Education in November. Bridgepoint is a for-profit educational services company based in San Diego. Leshu Torchin ’95 is a senior lecturer in film studies at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Mindy Tran ’97 joined the Portland office of Seacoast Commercial Bank in October as a senior vice president and small business development officer. William C. Smith ’01 is a senior policy analyst for the Global Education Monitoring Report team of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He lives in Paris, France. Ben Kujala ’07, MS ’09 was recently named power division director of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in Portland. The council is a federally mandated agency that maintains a regional electric power plan that takes into account environmental needs for Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. Sarah Luvaas MS ’08 received the White House Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in September. Luvaas is a third-grade teacher at Redland Elementary School in Oregon City. Steven “Pv” Jantz ’12 was appointed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducy to the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing. Jantz has been a rehabilitation counselor for the state. Lucy Mihajlich ’12 received more kickstarter funds than she asked for to write and publish her first book in a young adult trilogy. Interface is set in a future when the Internet is worshiped and a daughter of a powerful computer company has been kidnapped. Tawna Sanchez MSW ’12 and Teresa Alonso Leon MPH ’13 were elected in November to the Oregon House of Representatives for Districts 43 and 22, respectively. Sanchez is the first Native American to serve in the legislature, and Leon is the first immigrant Latina. William C. Smith Tawna Sanchez Teresa Alonso Leon Sarah Luvaas Ben Kujala