Steering Commitee
Jack Irvine (Chairman)
Jack Irvine is a retired physician of Internal Medicine who practiced in Humboldt County for 38 years. He has been an active volunteer for a number of community organizations including St. Joseph’s Hospital Board of Trustees, Clarke Memorial Museum Board of Directors, Humboldt County Historical Society Board of Directors, and currently serves as the Board President of the Humboldt Senior Resource Center and Board Member of the Humboldt Library Foundation. He has been an anti-war and peace activist for many years.
Jim Hubbard
Jim is a retired software developer but his true passion is music, performing, directing, recording production, and education. Jim was the director of the Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir for 6 years and has been in numerous music projects. Jim’s musical background began when he was 10 years old in Scotland where he learned to play guitar and sing. Since then Jim has crafted his own music and spent many hours in the studio as a writer, performer, and engineer. He characterizes himself as a “jack-of-all-trades” when it comes to music production. He has produced 2 CDs of his own music and many other cd projects.
Jim was also the C.E.O and principal of a local software company with 22 employees with various skill sets. The customer base ranged from small organizations with 3 to 10 employees to government agencies with enterprise-level technologies.
Dale Preston
Dale L. Preston, Ph.D., is a biostatistician with almost 40 years’ experience describing and quantifying the long-term health effects of radiation in humans. He played a central role in developing the modern methods and tools used to characterize radiation effects and has authored or co-authored almost 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Between 1981 and 2004, while living in Hiroshima, Dr. Preston worked on studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic-bomb survivors, at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation and remains active in the Foundation’s research. Since 1987 he has been involved in studies of various Russian populations, initially Chernobyl victims, but primarily people exposed to radiation as a result of the operations of the Russian reactor and plutonium production complex (Mayak). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, and other groups around the world. Dr. Preston is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2017 he received the Failla award in recognition of a history of significant contributions to radiation research by the Radiation Research Society.
John Heckel
John Heckel is a retired professor of theatre and film at Humboldt State University. John has directed both film and theatre, educationally and professionally. He has been fortunate enough to have lived, taught and directed in multiple foreign countries. After serving as his mother’s primary care-giver until her death at the age of 95, John went back to school to receive a Ph.D. in psychology. He currently advocates for seniors, directs the occasional play, does gender and couples therapy consulting, and writes articles and a monthly column on the difficulties of aging.
Wendy Butler
Wendy Butler as an educator, writer and radio producer. She is a College of the Redwoods associate faculty member teaching in the college’s Adult & Community Education department. Much of her CR teaching work is at Humboldt County Correctional Facility, where she teaches multiple subjects and does so with an emphasis on reading, critical thinking and writing. She has served on local literacy and arts boards. She has spent more than two decades working as a writer and editor for various local print publications. She also served for 23 years as a radio producer and host for various programs including weekly interview program Artwaves at KHSU public radio, based at Cal Poly Humboldt.