Love & Wisdom
Most Influential: Sandra Jackson-Dumont
Deputy Director of Education and Public Programs/Adjunct Curator, Seattle Art Museum
Four years ago, when Sandra Jackson-Dumont was working at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she received a call from then-director Mimi Gates at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Gates was looking to fill a deputy director position for community outreach at SAM. “I recommended several people,” Jackson-Dumont recalls. “Then she called back for me.” Just…
Most Influential: Speight Jenkins
Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins is a hands-on ambassador
Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins is a hands-on ambassador. Now in his 28th season, Jenkins attends every performance, greets patrons as they arrive and seizes every opportunity to create new opera fans—even when he’s 30,000 feet in the air. “I’ve never gone on a plane flight [on which] I haven’t convinced someone to try…
Most Influential: CEO Ben Huh
Pet Holding CEO Ben Huh knows the secret recipe in this era of Facebook
The road to business success on the Internet is littered with the corpses of those who have tried and failed: sock puppets, online lackeys, search engines. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that a guy with a simple website filled with pictures of cats and funny sayings somehow slipped under the radar to become a…
Most Influential: Robb Hunt and Steve Tomkins
Executive Producer Robb Hunt and Artistic Director Steve Tomkins turns Village Theater into a nation
Sure, it takes a village to create a theater, but at Issaquah’s Village Theatre, executive producer Robb Hunt and artistic director Steve Tomkins understand that it requires a special passion to turn a theater into a nationally renowned incubator of powerhouse productions. Under the guidance of Hunt and Tomkins (who’ve been with Village Theatre since…
Most Influential: Activist Keli Carender
Activist Keli Carender organizes protest at Westlake Park
“People credit me as the one who started the Tea Party,” says Keli Carender. “I feel like the tinder was already there, ready to burst into flames, and I just lit the match.” On Presidents Day 2009, Carender organized a “Porkulus” protest at Westlake Park downtown. Appalled by what she deemed excessive spending in the…
Most Influential: Zoran Popovic and David Baker
Computer Scientist Zoran Popovic meets Biochemist David Baker to collaborate on a video game that en
The meeting of University of Washington computer scientist Zoran Popovic and biochemist David Baker reads a bit like a sci-fi adventure: Computer scientist meets biochemist; computer scientist and biochemist collaborate on a video game that enables tens of thousands of people to contribute to scientific research by folding three-dimensional protein configurations on their home computers;…
Most Influential: Hanson Hosein
Director of the University of Washington's Master of Communication in Digital Media program Hanson H
Hanson Hosein isn’t your typical academic. A law student turned award-winning producer turned NBC Iraq war correspondent turned documentary filmmaker turned digital communications professor, this husband and father of two has built a career on blazing his own path. In his latest role as director of the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital…
Most Influential: M.D. and CEO Mitchell Gold
Mitchell Gold is CEO of Dendreon Corp. rocked into national headlines
Mitchell Gold and the company he heads, Seattle-based Dendreon Corp., rocketed into national headlines this year when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Dendreon’s Provenge as a treatment for late-stage prostate cancer. The value of the company’s stock multiplied more than 10 times as analysts estimated the drug could generate about $1 billion in…
Most Influential: Group Health Cooperative
Insurer and Health Care Provider, Group Health is the highest-rated commercial health plan in Washin
In September, Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative learned it’s the highest-rated commercial health plan in Washington state—and in the top 50 nationally—in a new ranking by the National Committee for Quality Assurance. With more than 600,000 members and more than two dozen medical centers throughout Washington state, Group Health has become a destination for health care…
Most Influential: Senator Tracey Eide
State Senator Tracey Eide has worked since 2000 to pass the primary-offense law for cell phones behi
Considering our burgeoning iPhone, smartphone, anyphone population, it’s virtually impossible to dispute state Senator Tracey Eide’s influence over our daily lives. As the driving force behind Washington state’s new cell phone law, which mandates parking our handheld phones before getting behind the wheel (or risking a $124 fine), Eide has worked since 2000 to pass…
Most Influential: CEO Paul Davis
Coinstar CEO Paul Davis spent much of 2009 fighting legal battles with movie studios
Penny-pinching consumers looking for cheap entertainment have flocked to Redbox DVD-rental vending machines and, in a year’s time, catapulted Bellevue-based Coinstar—Redbox’s parent company—onto the corporate big screen. Earlier this year, Redbox—originally a creation of McDonald’s but acquired by Coinstar last year—had grabbed 25 percent of U.S. video-rental sales, up from 18 percent a year earlier,…
Most Influential: The Seattle Times Staff
The Seattle Times staff is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news
The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news in journalism celebrates “a distinguished example of local reporting…with special emphasis on the speed and accuracy of the initial coverage, presented in print or online or both.” Last year, when The Seattle Times learned that four Lakewood police officers had been slain in a Pierce County coffee shop, Times…
Person of the Year: The Police Officer
We are not accustomed to seeing police officers as victims
We are not accustomed to seeing police officers as victims. Or as villains. But the past year in the Puget Sound region has focused our attention on law enforcement personnel so relentlessly, so vividly, that no year in recent memory can compare. Between October 31 and December 28, 2009, six officers—one from the Seattle Police…
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