Tim Westergren '84 and Elissa Slotkin '94 will be on campus to accept Distinguished Alum Awards
Elissa Slotkin ‘94
As the United States’ Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Elissa Slotkin ’94 brings a unique perspective on world affairs back to Cranbrook Schools. In her current role, she oversees development and implementation of defense policy in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Russia, and the Western Hemisphere.
It has been 20 years since Slotkin graduated from Cranbrook Schools and addressed the women of the class of 1994 from the podium in Christ Church as their elected graduation speaker. The two decades since that day have taken Slotkin around the world more than once. Her current role demands that she routinely provide advice to the Secretary of Defense and the White House on a range of defense policy issues -- from military operations in the Middle East and Africa to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
She joined the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy three years ago as the senior adviser for Middle East Transition, and prior to that she worked for both Presidents Bush and Obama at the White House ,and at the State Department, where she worked closely with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others, on Middle East policy.
Slotkin began her career in government as a member of the intelligence community. She served in Iraq for nearly two years and worked as Special Assistant to the U.S.’s first Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. Prior to her government career, Slotkin spent several years working for non-profit organizations in the Middle East and East Africa – learning Arabci and Swahili in the process -- after earning her master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and her undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
Slotkin cites her work helping to end the war in Iraq as among the most rewarding of her career. “I helped negotiate the U.S. - Iraq Status of Forces Agreement in 2008, which for the first time established a concrete timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, which President Obama completed in 2011,” she says. That agreement initiated the largest transition from U.S. military to civilian lead since the Marshall Plan following World War II. Slotkin asserts that after eight years of focus on that project, “To see that agreement signed and our troops depart were important emotional events in my life.”
In the years to come, Slotkin no doubt will continue to play a role on the world stage, continuing to put her lifelong passion for helping others to powerful use.
Tim Westergren ‘84
The digital music revolution over the last two decades has been, in no uncertain terms, remarkable. At the front line of that revolution has been Tim Westergren, a 1984 Cranbrook graduate.
After years working as an award-winning composer and accomplished musician, Westergren launched the Music Genome Project in 2000, an entity that evolved soon after into Pandora, which provides personalized listening services for its online listeners. By creating algorithms that would help predict what music people would like based on their previous choices, Westergren set the stage for the type of digital personalization transforming media today. Today, Pandora is the most popular online radio service with more than 76 million people listening to 1.7 billion hours of music each month.
Today at Pandora, Westergren says he wears a lot of hats. “I am a member of the board and part of a small leadership team that runs the company. I am involved in virtually every aspect of the company from ad sales and marketing to business development, investor relations and general evangelizing. No one day is like the next and that’s part of what makes it so rewarding.”
Westergren says that witnessing the growth of Pandora has been “an out of body experience. In the last fifteen years, I’ve seen it from when it was just an idea to a prototype to surviving the dot-com collapse to launching in 2005 and then its meteoric growth. I’ve witnessed the entire range of experiences. I feel lucky and very fulfilled by it and proud of it.”
Like so many great ideas, Pandora fills a very basic need and it does it really well. “I think we solve a big problem – helping people enjoy music they know and discover music they love – with a very simple solution,” Westergren says.
For Westergren, Pandora has provided a whole new, creative way to participate in the artistic sphere. “It has been an extraordinary time period for the music industry,” he says. “It has gone through, and continues to go through, an extended period of rapid change. It’s a very exciting time to be involved.”
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