Name droppers: UCD grad gets policy position

Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed Jessica Pearson, 33, of Sacramento, as the legislative and policy adviser at the Delta Stewardship Council, where she has served as senior policy adviser since 2011.

Pearson served as deputy secretary at the California Natural Resources Agency in 2010, and worked at the California Department of Water Resources as policy adviser to the director from 2007 to 2010 and special assistant to the chief deputy director from 2006 to 2007. She earned a master’s degree in community development from UC Davis.

This position does not require Senate confirmation and the annual compensation is $100,428. Pearson is registered decline-to-state.

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Bill Neel of Davis was inducted into the American Paint Horse Association Hall of Fame in a formal ceremony at the Fort Worth Hilton on Oct. 5, as part of the 2012 APHA annual convention. The Hall of Fame was created this year in honor of APHA’s 50th anniversary to celebrate the horses and people who laid its foundation for success.

Fifty members — 25 people and 25 horses — were selected as the Hall of Fame’s first class, consisting of only those very first pioneer humans and horses who either contributed directly to the founding the association or made significant contributions to its early growth.

Neel was born in 1927 and raised on a cattle ranch near Bisbee, Ariz. After seeing World War II action in the Pacific Theater, he moved to the West Coast and found work running the experimental feedlot at UC Davis. Neel’s first APHA-registered American paint horse was the homebred Kickapoo Kitten, an APHA champion and the 1973 national champion youth breakaway roping horse with Neel’s son Tom riding. In 1969, Diamond Dandy was acquired and shown to a national championship in working cow horse, a reserve national championship at halter and an APHA championship.

Neel was an early officer in the California Paint Horse Association, was an APHA director and served several years on the APHA Executive Committee.

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Dr. Michael Goodman, a local integrative gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner, recently returned from the annual international meeting of the North American Menopause Society in Orlando, Fla. The direction of this year’s meeting of menopause specialists was oriented toward new data regarding the safety of hormone therapy, sexual medicine issues as they relate to midlife women and the science and art of integrating healthful changes into the daily regimen of women traversing the menopause transition.

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Dr. Nathan Kuppermann, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and a nationally recognized expert in emergency medical services for children, has been honored with the 2012 Jim Seidel Distinguished Service Award by the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Emergency Medicine.

Kuppermann, who is professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at UC Davis and the Bo Tomas Brofeldt Endowed Chair of the department of emergency medicine, received the award during the academy’s national conference and exhibition on Saturday, Oct. 20, in New Orleans.

Kuppermann is a leading medical investigator whose highly regarded studies have focused on infectious emergencies in children, evaluation of children at risk of diabetic ketoacidosis-related cerebral injury and the efficacy of laboratory and radiographic diagnostic studies in pediatric trauma patients. His findings have been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and The Lancet.

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Maureen L. Stanton of Davis was among 180 influential artists, scientists, scholars, authors and institutional leaders who were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 6. Founded in 1780, the American Academy is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious learned societies, and an independent research center that draws from its members’ expertise to conduct studies in science and technology policy, global security, the humanities and culture, social policy and education.