Affiliated Scholars,

Margaret Pugh O'Mara is an historian of the twentieth century United States, Margaret O'Mara is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington, where she also serves as an advisor for external affairs in the Office of the President. She was at Stanford and at the Bill Lane Center from 2002 to 2007, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then as Associate Director and Acting Assistant Professor of History.

With Center faculty board member and Stanford professor Karen C. Seto (GES), she is leading a multi-year research project on the political, cultural, and economic drivers of urban growth in the "new Silicon Valleys" of India and China.

Dr. O'Mara received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). Her current research explores comparative urbanization and knowledge-economy development around the Pacific Rim.

O'Mara previously served in the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a political aide and policy analyst, working on health care, welfare, and urban economic development programs.   More here >

Leslie Berlin is the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archive at Stanford, a visiting scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. She also authors a monthly column about innovation and technology in the Sunday business section of The New York Times.

Matthew Morse Booker is a visiting scholar at the Spatial History Project and Bill Lane Center in 2008-2009. He completed his PhD in History at Stanford in 2005. He is assistant professor of History at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he teaches environmental history, the history of suburbs, and American history.

At Stanford, he is revising his dissertation for publication as Between the Tides: An Environmental History of San Francisco Bay. He is leading a related project in the Spatial History lab. He is also working on a global history of the oyster during the industrial and urban revolutions of the late nineteenth century. To reach Matthew Booker and for more information, click here

Jon Christensen has been roving the West as an environmental journalist and science writer for two decades. His work has appeared in The New York Times, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows, including NOW on PBS.

Jon was a Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003, and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004. Jon has also taught courses on environmental history and science in the West in the graduate program in interactive environmental journalism in the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He is currently associate director of The Spatial History Project of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Research includes the history of conservation, the science of conservation biology, and measuring conservation. He is working on a doctoral dissertation entitled "Critical Habitat" in History at Stanford exploring the science and practice of conservation in the West. He is developing a history of ideas, narratives, science, and practices of conservation of a species in time and space centering this history on the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly.