Three new trustees elected to board

By Ray Delgado

Three new members were elected to the university's Board of Trustees for five-year terms during meetings held earlier this week.

The new trustees are James E. Canales Jr., president and chief executive officer of the James Irvine Foundation; Lauren B. Dachs, executive director of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation; and Bruce W. Dunlevie, co-founder of Benchmark Capital.

"I'm extremely pleased that Jim, Laurie and Bruce have agreed to serve as trustees," Board Chair Burt McMurtry said. "Each has long and close relationships with various parts of Stanford, and I know they will make significant contributions to Stanford governance."

William C. Landreth left the board in December after serving 10 years. The board now has 34 members, one shy of the maximum allowed.

Canales has been president and chief executive officer of the Irvine Foundation since 2003. Previously, he served as vice president, chief administrative officer and special assistant to the president at the foundation, which he joined in 1993. Before that he was an English teacher and director of admissions and financial aid at San Francisco University High School. Canales earned his undergraduate degree in English at Stanford in 1988 and received the Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities. He also earned a master's degree in education from Stanford in 1989. He recently served as chair of the Stanford Alumni Association, where he was on the board from 1997 to 2005. He was a member of the Stanford Day in San Francisco Steering Committee in early 2005 and the Think Again Steering Committee in 2002. He has been a Stanford Associates member since 2002.

Prior to serving as the executive director of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Dachs founded and chaired the Lake School in Oakland. She also is a member on the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy of California, the Fremont Group Foundation, the Laural Foundation and the Advisory Council for the Center for Underrepresented Engineering Students (CUES) at the University of California-Berkeley's College of Engineering. She earned her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1971 at Stanford, where she has served on the board of visitors for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since 2001, the Parents' Program Advisory Board since 2004, and the Think Again Steering Committee in 2002.

Prior to co-founding Benchmark Capital in 1995, Dunlevie served as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre, a venture capital firm, for six years. In addition to his venture capital background, Dunlevie founded the Computer Systems Division of Everex Systems. He sits on several corporate boards, including Palm Inc. and Rambus Inc. Dunlevie earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Arjay Miller Scholar in 1984 and an undergraduate degree in English and history from Rice University in 1979. At Stanford, Dunlevie was a member of the Parents' Program Advisory Board until 2005 and served as a committee member for the DAPER (Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation) Investment Fund from 1995 to 2000.

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