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The Santa Fe Alliance for Science was formed by Bob Eisenstein and Susan McIntosh in the fall of 2004 and began operation in 2005. Its goal was to improve science education in Santa Fe by "making a marriage" between students and teachers in our local schools (public and private) and our scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical community.

Executive Director, SFAFS

Diane Smogor, Executive Director, SFAFS
Diane earned a B.S. in Community Health Education from the University of Illinois and has had extensive experience designing, implementing and managing a variety of community health programs.  Her 26 years of experience has spanned from conducting worksite health promotion workshops, to coordinating school-based programs and working with community coalitions.  As Vice President of a nonprofit organization in New Hampshire, she worked with many volunteers and community partners, wrote and managed grants, and led a statewide collaborative effort focused on lung disease.  A native of Chicago, Diane is excited to work in Santa Fe, a place that feels like home to her.

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SFAFS Board of Directors

Caren Shiozaki, CGEIT, President
Caren earned a degree in genetics from the University of California at Berkeley, but decided to pursue information technology as a profession. She is currently the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for TMST, Inc. Prior to moving to Santa Fe, she was CIO for a Dallas-based media company, responsible for the technologies driving newspapers, TV stations and websites. She has extensive international business experience from working at Bank of America and American Express. She supports STEM programs run by Girls Inc. of Santa Fe and the Society for Information Management.

Ginger Richardson, Vice-President
Ginger is Co-Founder of Make Santa Fe, a community workspace that supports creative learning and collaboration.  Formerly she was McKinnon Family Vice President for Education at the Santa Fe Institute.

Bruce Abell, Secretary
Bruce Abell also co-chairs SFAFS's science fair program. He was a co-founder of Santa Fe Center for Emergent Strategies (now Santa Fe Associates International), vice president of Santa Fe Institute, senior fellow at Hudson Institute, business strategy consultant, assistant director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, official of the National Science Foundation, and science magazine writer and editor. He's a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania and has lived in Santa Fe for 25 years.

Bruce Johnson, Treasurer
Is a recently retired accounting professor (B.S. University of Oregon, M.S. and PH.D. Ohio State University) who has held faculty appointments at Northwestern University, and the universities of Chicago, Iowa, Texas—Austin, and Wisconsin—Madison. His research explores the role of financial information in capital markets, managers’ incentives to distort accounting numbers, and the susceptibility of finance professionals to ineffective judgment heuristics and biases. He has served as an advisor to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and as a member of the AICPA’s Financial Standards Executive Committee. Bruce is passionate about improving STEM educational opportunities throughout New Mexico.

Jim Amann is a retired physicist with a more than 30 year research career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other accelerator facilities in the U.S., Japan and Europe. Born in Buffalo, NY, he received his bachelors degree from Fordham University and PhD from SUNY Stony Brook. While a staff member at LANL he participated in the TOPS Mentor program for middle school math and science teachers. Within SFAFS he has been active both as a tutor with and as a judge at local and regional science fairs.

Robert Eisenstein (board member emeritus) is a retired physicist now living in Boston, MA. He was educated at Oberlin College, Yale University (PhD) and the Weizmann Institute. He spent many years on the faculties of Carnegie Mellon University and University of Illinois, where he often taught physics to freshmen and sophomore engineering students. He also spent more than a decade at the National Science Foundation, and for a brief time was president of the Santa Fe Institute. From 2007 to 2009 he chaired the New Mexico Math and Science Advisory Council. He co-founded SFAFS in 2005 (with Susan McIntosh) and was its director until 2014. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Dean Gerber is a former executive director of SFAFS. He's a mathematical scientist who has been a volunteer with SFAFS since 2011. He grew up in Santa Fe and attended Wood Gormley, Harrington, and Santa Fe High. He's a graduate of Caltech and has a PhD from NYU. After a long career with IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center he retired back to Santa Fe. Having benefited from attention from Santa Fe teachers who helped him blossom as a student, he has particular concern for helping identify and encourage students who may have limited opportunities. He is co-chair of SFAFS's science fair program.

Chari Kauffman as an educator for nearly 30 years, Chari has taught various grade levels K-8. She has worked for SFPS for the last 13 years. Previously she was the STEM Coach at El Dorado Community School and the district’s Science Partner Liaison. She also organized the district Science Expo. Chari continues to facilitate teacher trainings in STEM education for the LANL Foundation’s ISEC program and for the state’s Science and Math Bureau, in Making Sense of Science.  With a passion for STEM education, she looks forward to supporting and growing with SFPS as the Science and Math Instructional Coordinator, to assist students in acquiring 21st Century skills.

Judy Reinhartz ​(New Director as of September 2018. Judy Reinhartz is Professor Emeritus from The University of Texas at El Paso where she also was an administrator. She has a Bachelors from Rutgers University, Masters from Seton Hall University, and Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. Her career has spanned over five decades that have been filled with great diversity and creative experiences.  She is the recipient of several awards, including the Chancellor’s Outstanding University Teacher Award.  She has been an elementary and secondary science teacher, staff developer, researcher, grant writer, and presenter. These roles have propelled her enthusiasm for meeting new challenges and with them solving problems. Fostering a research agenda in the schools promoted a culture of inquiry that deepened teachers’ and administrators’ knowledge about pedagogy and science instruction in diverse settings. She is the author of many books and articles, most recently Growing Language Through Science: Strategies That Work. Since retiring, she enjoys volunteering and working side-by-side with students and teachers to expand the presence of science in elementary classrooms and serves as the Co-Leader of the Adopt-A-School program.)

Hubert van Hecke is a particle physicist at Los Alamos, having worked on a series of experiments at CERN and Brookhaven Lab over the past 30 years. He has lived in Santa Fe since the mid-80's. He has done a weekly 'science hour' at Wood Gormley Elementary for over 20 years. He grew up in the Netherlands, and is a graduate of LSU and Syracuse University.

Kathy Brechner is a relative newcomer to Santa Fe and has been volunteering with the Alliance for Science for two years now.   She has a BA in Geology and an MBA in industrial marketing.   After a career with the government and then the corporate world, she served for 16 years in New York as an elected Board of Education Trustee for both her local school district and then the regional PNW Board of Cooperative Education.  During this time, she became a Horticultural Therapist, registered through the American Horticultural Therapy Association, and now works with the elderly here in Santa Fe.

Locally, Kathy serves on the board of the Santa Fe Master Gardeners Association. Other board service has included serving with the Mid Atlantic Horticultural Therapy Network, the Putnam Northern Westchester School Boards Association, Temple Israel of Norther Westchester, and she is especially proud to have been the first NY state school board trustee to be invited to earn her Fellowship in the Educational Policy Fellowship Program under the Institute for Educational Leadership.

She looks forward to getting more involved with the SF Alliance for Science.

Suzanne Roepke is a retired math teacher who enjoyed many years of experience with middle and high school students.  Suzanne received undergraduate degrees from both the University of Iowa and UNM.   Her MA is in Anthropology and Archaeology from U Iowa.  While employed by Santa Fe Public Schools, she was a GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically) club sponsor and helped found the Math Blitz middle school program with Robert Eisenstein and Ellen Levy.  As a volunteer with SFAFS, Suzanne has been active both as a math tutor at New Mexico School for the Arts and as a science fair judge in the public schools.

Pareekshith Allu Paree Allu is a senior computational fluid dynamics (CFD) engineer at Flow Science, Inc. located in Santa Fe, NM. Paree has experience in the areas of scientific computing and numerical methods and is a published author in the field of nanoscale heat transfer. His current focus is on applying CFD tools to additive manufacturing, laser welding and metal casting applications. In his position at Flow Science, he has worked with researcher scientists and program managers from the industry, academia and national labs to help develop CFD models for laser powder bed fusion and direct energy deposition processes. He has also been invited to several international conferences to speak on the latest CFD modelling advances for laser welding and additive manufacturing. Paree holds a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Technology in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Barbara Bianchi Barbara began her career in public education as an elementary school teacher.  She taught Kindergarten through grade 4 for nearly 20 years in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Santa Fe, and was a district-level mentor teacher for Santa Fe Public Schools.  She earned a Master’s degree in Education Administration and Supervision and was a state administrator and manager for ten years at the New Mexico Public Education Department, working on district/school accreditation, strategic planning, elementary arts education, state-funded PreK, parent/community involvement, after-school programming, rural education, and student assessment.  She also worked for the Center for Research and Educational Policy for several years as a science education researcher.  She has been a volunteer with the Alliance for eight years.  During that time she has been a Science/STEM Fair judge and has worked on curriculum design for classroom experiment presentations, been a classroom presenter, and student project mentor.

Former  Board Members

Phyllis Baca
Kate Binns
Kathryn Bueler
Kristy Dillingham
Rocco Fancellu
Kurt Fischer
Gerry Garvey
Lina Germann
Robert Heffner
Ruth Howes
Tobey King
Ellen Levy
Juniper Lovato
Susan McIntosh
George Rubottom
Carole Rutten
Donald Sandstrom
Jay Shelton
Anne Weaver
Richard Hertz