Farewells
The Mentor
Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani—the computer scientist who helped hundreds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, notably mentoring the Google founders—was the type who'd go introduce himself to someone who appeared awkward at a graduate student mixer. "Rajeev suddenly came up to me, began a friendly conversation and started enthusiastically telling me about a research problem he was working on," blogged Aleksandra Korolova, who became one of Motwani's students.
Motwani, 47, died June 5. He drowned in his backyard swimming pool; friends said he did not know how to swim. Motwani earned his bachelor's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and his PhD at UC-Berkeley. He made groundbreaking contributions to the realms of robotics, data mining, and search and information retrieval. He wrote Randomized Algorithms and co-authored the classic textbook Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. He received several honors, including the illustrious Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science.
Balaji Prabhakar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and of computer science, said the most striking thing about Motwani was his ability to see the potential in people and ideas. He was encouraging and generous with his time, making him a sought-after mentor. "The process of transforming a shy incoming graduate student to a mature, confident researcher is a delicate one and Rajeev did it very well over and over again," Moses Charikar, MS '98, PhD '01, blogged. A super connector who introduced innumerable entrepreneurs, Motwani was a board member or adviser to many companies, including Google, Dot Edu Ventures and Adchemy.
Motwani is survived by his wife, Asha Jadeja; daughters Naitra and Anya; and two brothers.
The man who was helping a tiny Eskimo village in Alaska sue energy giants like Chevron for allegedly destroying their land is gone. Luke Cole, a pioneer in environmental justice law, died June 6 in a car crash in Uganda. He was 46.
Cole, '84, had impeccable academic credentials and could have worked anywhere, blogged Elizabeth Martin, CEO of The Sierra Fund, but used his life to help underprivileged communities fight corporate polluters. At Stanford, he studied political science, worked for the Daily and was a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity. After graduating cum laude from Harvard Law, Cole aimed to combine his passions for law, the environment and social justice.
"He was told by poverty law firms that they don't do environmental law, and the big environmental groups said they don't do law for poor people," Brent Newell, legal director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE), told the San Francisco Chronicle. Cole then met poverty lawyer Ralph Abascal, who helped him found the CRPE in San Francisco in 1989. The organization has fought against garbage dumps, mega dairies and other entities they believe pose hazards disproportionately to poorer districts.
Cole was a member of the E.P.A.'s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and taught seminars at Stanford Law School and UC-Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
Survivors: his wife, Nancy Shelby; his son, Zane Shelby; his parents and stepmother; two brothers; a sister; and a stepbrother.
Irving Schulman chaired the committee that designed the first licensing exam for pediatric hematologist-oncologists in the 1970s. Today there are about 2,000 licensed practitioners in the discipline. The number on Schulman's license: 2.
Schulman, 87, chair emeritus of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, died June 11 of complications of pneumonia. He arrived on campus in 1972 to a small department of pediatrics only loosely affiliated with the Children's Hospital at Stanford. He spent the next 19 years building a nationally recognized and respected center for academic and clinical pediatrics, and worked extensively with Lucile Packard to construct a modern new hospital. He served as Packard Children's first chief of staff when the facility opened in 1991.
Born in New York, he earned his bachelor's and MD from New York University. From 1946 to 1948, he served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps. After residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he was a faculty member at Cornell University Medical Center and Northwestern University Medical School. He distinguished himself as an expert in pediatric blood diseases. He was among the first to describe hemophilia arising from deficiency of blood clotting Factor IX in children, and one of the first to utilize a now-routine steroid treatment for acute leukemia in children. In 1961 he joined the University of Illinois as head of pediatrics, remaining there until he joined Stanford. He won various awards, including the 1960 E. Mead Johnson Award for outstanding scientific achievement in pediatrics.
Some of his best efforts, however, were not strictly medical. Former residents noted on a School of Medicine online guestbook that Schulman always pushed them to be their best. And his son, John, recalled his rapport with patients, telling the School of Medicine: "One-, 2- and 3-year-olds could be in the worst medical condition, and somehow Dad would get them to smile and laugh."
In addition to John, he is survived by his wife of more than 59 years, Naomi; a daughter, Margaret Miller; two grandchildren; and a sister.
