Class of 2004

(Top Row) Dan Moreau, Thea Lavin, David Burger (Middle Row) Lia Steakley, Katie Vaughn, Elizabeth White, Hugh Biggar, Daniel Kreiss, Geoff Koch, Mary Albert (Bottom Row) Avital Binshtock, Dandan Wu, Sharmeen Obaid, Lorraine Sanders, Kathryn Wallace

Mary Albert
Mary was born in Medford, Oregon in 1976. The daughter of a Foreign Service officer, she spent most of her childhood abroad, mainly in northern Europe. She graduated from the International School of Brussels in 1994 with an international baccalaureate degree. She then pursued a bachelors of arts in English at Dartmouth College. Having paid for college with a scholarship from the U.S. Army, she worked as an active duty Army officer for several years after college. She is now making a career change into journalism. After finishing her masters in communication at Stanford, she hopes to work as a reporter in the Bay Area.

Hugh Biggar
Hugh grew up in Ghana, West Africa and the Washington, D.C. area. After college he served in the Peace Corps as a teacher in Poland, then moved back to Washington where he worked for non-profit organizations and freelanced for The Washington Post and other publications. He is interested in environmental writing and education.

Avital Binshtock
Originally from Calabasas, California, Avital spent her undergraduate years at the University of California, Los Angeles where she majored in communication studies and political science and minored in anthropology. During college, she interned at National Geographic Television. Since graduating in 2001, she has been associate editor for Beverly Hills Weekly and editorial assistant for Elite Traveler magazine. She has also freelanced extensively and is a published photographer.

David Burger
Originally from Ventura County, California, David graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut in 1998 with a B.S. in government with high honors. While there he was executive officer of Bravo Company and was on the crew and sailing teams. He served as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1998-2003, and was stationed on a USCG ship in Long Beach, California from 1998-2000 . He was a vessel inspector at the USCG Marine Safety Office in Morgan City, Louisiana until the summer of 2003, when he left the service as a Lieutenant. While in Louisiana, he worked for two years as a staff writer for The Daily Review, the daily newspaper in Morgan City, and during the summer of 2003 he was an intern at the Ventura County Reporter in Ventura, California. He is currently an intern covering politics at the San Mateo County Times in San Mateo, California, and after graduation he hopes to work in newspapers and magazines.

Geoff Koch
Geoff hails from Portland and comes to Stanford after six years of writing and editing experience at Intel Corporation. He's an aspiring science writer and hopes to finally get some mileage out of his University of California, Davis biology degree when he begins his science journalism career in earnest. He claims to have a good handle on Portland's culinary scene.

Daniel Kreiss
Daniel worked in nonprofit program services and fundraising for the last four years in New York City. He was most recently the director of an after-school program in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He received a B.A. in political science from Bates College in 1999. As an undergraduate, he also studied development and political science in Durban, South Africa, and Kingston, Jamaica. He will pursue a career in international reporting after graduation.

Thea Lavin
Thea graduated cum laude from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where she received her bachelors degree in history. Her rural upbringing on a seventh generation family homestead in Kansasville, Wisconsin, influenced her undergraduate academic pursuits, which culminated in her honors history thesis, "Negotiating Survival: Farm women's participation in, and resistance to, the commercial transformation of Upper Midwestern family farms: 1913- 1950."After graduation in 2001, she worked in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, as a case manager to lower income elderly and as an independent freelance writer. She also served as her workplace union steward and won first-ever overtime benefits for her coworkers.

Daniel Moreau
Daniel is from Galveston, Texas. A 2001 Stanford graduate, he worked most recently for Newsweek in New York; Agence France-Presse in Islamabad, Pakistan; and the Palo Alto Weekly, among other publications.

Sharmeen Obaid
Sharmeen was born and raised in Karach, Pakistan. In 2002, she completed her bachelors degree in economics and government from Smith College. Since then, she has produced two documentaries for The New York Times, one of which aired on the Discovery Times Channel in March 2003. The second is scheduled to air in January 2004. In June 2003, she completed her first masters in international policy studies from Stanford University. After graduating from the Graduate Program in Journalism, she will work on her third documentary for The New York Times.

Lorraine Sanders
Lorraine grew up in Richmond, Virginia, went to Brown University, lived in London for a year, then moved to California in the summer of 2000. After working in public relations, consulting, doggie daycare, and the travel industry, she is happy to be pursuing journalism at Stanford. Outside of academia and professional interests, she enjoys messy and impractical craft projects, kick boxing, red wine, and trashy reality television.

Lia Steakley
Lia graduated with a B.A. in communication from San Francisco University in 2001. Prior to coming to Stanford University, she worked as a community journalist for the Sonoma Index-Tribune in Sonoma, California and a freelance writer for Wired and Engineering News-Record. She is currently writing for the Palo Alto Weekly and Orange Magazine.

Katie Vaughn
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Katie earned bachelor's degrees in journalism and art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her experience in journalism includes writing political pieces and features for The Badger Herald, a variety of stories for Madison Magazine and theater reviews, features and a weekly theater column for The Wisconsin State Journal. She has also traveled extensively, visiting over 30 countries. After graduation, she hopes to work at a newspaper or magazine covering public and family issues, travel or the arts.

Kathryn Wallace
After a few years of hustling in the dog-eat-dog world of freelance journalism in Washington, D.C., Kathryn enrolled in the Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford University. She is a Brigham Young University graduate in the humanities, and worked for Jack Anderson's Syndicated column and the Center for Public Integrity, both in Washington, D.C. After graduating, she hopes to take a job overseas.

Elizabeth White
Elizabeth came to Stanford University directly after graduating from the University of Utah in English and communication. While at Utah, she worked as a news writer and news editor at the Daily Utah Chronicle and as a reporting intern and copy editor at the Deseret Morning News. While studying abroad in Guadalajara, Mexico, she worked at the local English- language weekly, conducting interviews in Spanish and covering local reaction to September 11th. She also served as editor of the university literary magazine her sophomore year and wrote a thesis on Joint Operating Agreements her senior year. After graduating from Stanford, she hopes to get an internship at a metropolitan daily newspaper. She eventually wants to cover international affairs and politics.

Dandan Wu
Dandan was born in Nanjing, China. In 1999, she attended Fudan University in Shanghai, where she earned her B.A. degree in English language and literature. In college, she had various internships with the Chinese media industry, including Shanghai Daily, Nanjing TV, Jiangsu TV, and the Information Office of the Shanghai Municipality. In 2002, she was chosen by AOL Time Warner to intern at CNN Headquarters in Atlanta; there she worked for CNN International and received an intensive three-month training in news gathering and reporting. Hoping to become an international correspondent in the future, she aspires to better connect China with the world.