Introducing the d.school Fellows for 2008-2009, Erica Estrada, Joel Sadler, Scott Witthoft, and Corey Ford. After an extensive process of applications, multiple interviews, meet-and-greets, and heart-to-hearts, we are so pleased and proud to announce all four of our new fellows for this coming year, chosen from a crowd of truly amazing candidates.
In the past 24 hours, we have wrested a two-sentence biography from each of them, and you can read them below. Congratulations and welcome to the team!
Erica Estrada is from Texas if she's in California, and from California if she's in Texas. A Stanford Mechanical Engineering and Design for Extreme Affordability alum, she's spent the past year traveling the world with her trusty travel sheets, lighting up unnelectrified villages with LED lights as a product designer and co-founder of d.light design.
Joel Sadler came from a childhood building potato cannons in Jamaica to a mechanical engineering degree at MIT where he fell in love with design and the power of human-centered creation. After a making vow to avoid cold weather he has since explored design in various industries, including in medical devices and consumer electronics. For the last year he has been pursuing a masters degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford.
Scott Witthoft arrived in California by way of Tucson, AZ, St. Louis, MO, and most recently Austin, TX. Beyond understanding the magic of Thursdays and Saturdays, Scott spent his time in the field of forensic structural engineering.
Corey Ford loves a good story, adventure, creativity, and his wife. Before Stanford business school, Corey led the production of 17 films for the PBS public affairs series FRONTLINE, where each film allowed him to continually quench his desire to discover the world by immersing him in new subjects (from terrorism to the music industry), sending him on adventures (from riding around with gang cops in LA to tracking down a mountain lion), and introducing him to people from all walks of life (from interviewing a struggling truck driver to taking a dead drop from a high level government official on a dark DC street corner).
