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 was 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 revised his dissertation for publication as Between the Tides: An Environmental History of San Francisco Bay. He led a related project in the Spatial History lab. He also worked 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