Coe Park Preservation Fund
Henry W. Coe State Park
The Wilderness Next Door
Leadership Team
CPPF is a grassroots group composed of people who love Coe Park, some whom have been visiting and volunteering in Coe Park for thirty years or more. The group is resolved to preserve the park and its unique wilderness, and to keep it open for all to enjoy. Below are the biographies of the CPPF board members.
Ann Briggs has been involved with environmental causes since 1975 when she was board member and later president of the board of the Peninsula Conservation Center in Palo Alto (now Acterra).
From 1980 until her retirement in 1996, Ann worked as an Environmental Information Specialist for Acurex Corporation, an engineering firm specializing in testing and cleanup of air and water pollution. Starting in 1986, she was also Corporate Librarian.
In 1978, she and her husband discovered the beauties of hiking in Coe park, and in 1984, joined the Trails Advisory Committee. They did extensive trail planning, marking, and signing under the direction of then Superintendent Harry Batlin, and later Supervising Ranger Kay Robinson.
In 1996, they took the training and became uniformed volunteers and by 2001 had joined the board of directors of the Pine Ridge Association (PRA). Mrs. Briggs was President of the board from 2003-2006, and has continued as a board member ever since. During that time, she was also manager of the PRA store and established a much needed computerized Point of Sale system.
In 1999 Mrs. Briggs and her husband received the DeWitt Award for partnership with the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
Winslow R. Briggs is currently Director (emeritus), Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, and Professor of Biology (emeritus), Stanford University. He began volunteering in Henry W. Coe state park in the late1970's and has volunteered ever since — the past 15 years as a trained uniformed volunteer. While a trained volunteer he has donated over 8,000 hours of service to the park. He was a member of the park's Trails Committee for over ten years (chairman most of that time) and participated in locating trail corridors in newly acquired land, designing trails, building trails, developing a signs program, and installing signs. He and his wife received the DeWitt Award from the California Department of Parks and Recreation in 1999 for their partnership with the Department.
Prof. Briggs is an elected member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards within his field of plant biology. He has served as President of The American Institute of Biological Sciences, the California Botanical Society, and the American Society of Plant Biologists. Most recently he received the prestigious International Prize for Biology (Japan) and was elected an Einstein Professor by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has over 250 professional publications to his credit. He still maintains an active laboratory studying the signaling effects of visible light on bacteria and plants (his group along with others demonstrated that blue light is essential for the virulence of the pathogenic bacterium Brucella ). For the past four years, he has been carrying out a detailed study of vegetation recovery in the several different ecosystems in Coe Park following the 2007 Lick Fire .
Ron Fischler is a co-founder and currently Vice-President of Quality Assurance at AnaCom, Inc. in San Jose, California which designs, manufactures and distributes satellite communications equipment used world-wide. In the past he has worked at Applied Signal Technology and Lockheed as a software developer / engineer.
Ron Fischler was President for two years (2007-2008) of the non-profit organization Leadership Sunnyvale whose mission is to educate and empower residents of the city of Sunnyvale (and beyond) to participate in their local government. This intensive nine month community leadership program is one of the most prestigious of it's kind in the country and thus far has produced more than 600 graduates.
Ron became active in the protection of Henry W. Coe State Park through Advocates for Coe Park, an organization which successfully protected Coe from reservoir development proposals and then a proposed High-Speed Rail route through the park.
Ron Fischler is currently participating in the 2007 Lick Fire Recovery Project which has been monitoring the dramatic changes and rapid recovery since the fire.
Libby Vincent has had an extensive career in technical documentation in the networking industry, working as writer, editor, and manager of technical writers, technical editors, and graphics staff. She has also managed localization into multiple languages across continents. She currently works in research administration at Stanford University and is looking forward to retiring one day and moving closer to Coe Park from Palo Alto where she now lives.
Libby was born in Australia and lived in England and Canada before moving to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen. She feels passionately that parks, especially California's glorious State Parks but also all open spaces and wilderness areas, need to be protected and preserved, made safe from the depredations of those who seek to misuse them.
Libby has been an active Coe Park uniformed volunteer for 20 years. She has served on the board of the Pine Ridge Association and currently serves on the Trails and Springs Planning Committee. Libby is actively working with park staff to fund and develop Coe Park's first ADA-accessible trail in Hunting Hollow in the southwestern corner of the park. She has performed resource inventory in areas of property acquired by the State, staffs the visitor center and park events, works on trails, leads hikes, performs foot and vehicle patrols, and participates in training new volunteers. She is editor of The Ponderosa, the publication of the Pine Ridge Association. Libby has received the volunteer of the year award from the Pine Ridge Association, the Coe State Park volunteer of the year award from the State, and the Golden Bear Award from the Department of Parks and Recreation.
Webmaster and Board Member
Before retiring in 2004, Robert D. Patrie served as Director of Product and Test Engineering at Zilog, and subsequently held Principal Engineering positions with Apple, Mips Computer Systems and Xilinx. He has received 17 patents and several awards for technical innovation.
In 1975 Mr. Patrie helped found the Pine Ridge Association, the Cooperating State Park Association at Henry W. Coe State Park, which has since grown to one of the largest such organizations in the state. In the early 1980s he was instrumental in gaining legislative support for land acquisitions that grew the park from 13,000 acres to more than 67,000 acres. In 2003 he was part of a group that succeeded in preventing the construction of reservoirs that would have inundated portions of Coe Park. The following year he played a key role in assuring that California's proposed High Speed Rail project would not be constructed through or under Coe Park.
In recognition of his long term contributions to Coe Park, he was awarded the Monterey District Public Service Award in 2004, and the Superior Achievement Award from the Director of the Department Parks and Recreation 1n 2005.
Mr. Patrie is currently participating in a research project to monitor the recovery of Coe Park from the 2007 Lick Fire.
Advisory Board
Minjung Kwok is Chief Operating and Finance Officer for the Futures Without Violence (formerly Family Violence Prevention Fund), an organization that works to advance the health, stability, education and security of women and girls, men and boys worldwide.
Prior to joining Futures Without Violence, Ms. Kwok served as Associate Chair for Program Development and Strategic Planning in the Stanford Department of Medicine. As Associate Chair, she had a broad set of responsibilities that set program priorities and achieve integration across the diverse missions and divisions in the department. Projects included developing a new program for residency education (international experiences, leadership training and health services/policy research); directing the department's symposium on society and health; and providing oversight of an array of activities to strengthen primary care practice and education in the department.
Past experience includes appointment as Director of Administration for Stanford Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) and Center for Health Policy (CHP), Operations Director at Harvard University (Office of Sponsored Programs), and a Senior Research Administrator at Boston University Medical Center.
Ms. Kwok was a member of Human Rights Committee for Vinfen Corporation, a nonprofit human services organization that provide services to adults and children with mental illness, developmental disabilities, and behavioral health disabilities. She also served as an Educational Advocate for the Massachusetts Department of Education, representing children in absence of legal guardians.
J. Daniel McCranie is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of ON Semiconductors, a manufacturer of semiconductor products. He is also a Board director at Cypress Semiconductor, a supplier of programmable semiconductors, and Freescale Corporation, a manufacturer of complex integrated circuits.
In the recent past, Mr. McCranie served as Executive Chairman of Virage Logic, a provider of application optimized semiconductor intellectual property platforms, from October 2008 until it was purchased by Synopsys in September 2010. Previously, Mr. McCranie served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Virage Logic from January 2007 to October 2008, Executive Chairman of Virage Logic from March 2006 to January 2007, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Virage Logic from August 2003 to March 2006.
Prior to joining Virage Logic, from 1993 until his retirement in 2001, Mr. McCranie was employed in various positions with Cypress Semiconductor, a supplier of diversified, broadline semiconductor products, focusing on the communications industry, lastly as its Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales.
From 1986 to 1993, Mr. McCranie was President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of SEEQ Technology, Inc., a manufacturer of semiconductor devices.
In addition to the assignments, and within the last decade, Mr. McCranie has also served as Chairman of the Board of Actel Corporation, a designer and provider of field programmable gate arrays and programmable system chips, Chairman of the Board of Xicor Corporation, a manufacturer of electrically erasable semiconductor memory devices, Board director of California Microdevices, a manufacturer of integrated passive components and Board director of ASAT Corporation, an assembly and test company focusing on the semiconductor industry.
