Personal Biography
I grew up in the Silicon Valley in California while it was transitioning from orchards to high-tech factories. My mother and father were both engineers. My uncles were engineers. The other people living on my street were engineers. I started down the path toward becoming a musician, but discovered that that was something best reserved for people with truly exceptional talent. Meanwhile, I discovered that economics and then international relations were very well-suited for people who come from the engineering tribe.
I have the good fortune to be married to Kathlyn Taylor Gaubatz. Kathy has an academic background (Ph.D. in Politics; Princeton, 1989), but by choice, she has spent her career in the nonprofit sector. She served as executive director of Compass Family Services in San Francisco and was the founder of Virginia Social Ventures in Norfolk. Currently, she works as a nonprofit management consultant and interim executive director in Washington, DC. Kathy is the author of Crime in the Public Mind (Univ of Michigan Press, 1995), and has written on family homelessness in the United States and the U.K.
Two adult children, Jayne and Andrew, complete the immediate family. Jayne is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Madagascar), and a family medicine doctor currently working for Doctors Without Borders. Andrew is a systems engineer designing games in San Francisco.
The world is an interesting place, in all its miraculous, occasionally terrifying, and often completely incomprehensible dimensions. For better or worse, I have been privileged to think on these things in my professional life. To keep things balanced, I enjoy running, biking, reading, music, and tinkering in the workshop.