Notable Alumni

Colorado Rocky Mountain School alumni leave their mark on the world in a diverse array of ways. Below are profiles of a few of the 2,000 students for whom CRMS has been a springboard.

Simon Isaacs '99 Simon Isaacs is a leading thinker in sustainability and cause-related marketing. Simon is a Vice President at ignition – Inc where he leads the cause-marketing division, working with corporate and nonprofit brands develop and launch global awareness, fundraising and marketing campaigns around issues such as clean water, malaria, HIV/AIDS and education. Simon’s clients include the Coca-Cola Company, Gucci, Chick-Fil-A, BP, the World Wildlife Fund, the Ubuntu Education Fun, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Foundation among others. Simon also helps lead cause and sustainability work around the 2010 FIFA World Cup and Vancouver Olympics.

Simon previously lived in Rwanda where he worked for the William J. Clinton Foundation, directing safe drinking water and agriculture programs. Prior to Rwanda, Simon served as a Partnerships Officer at the United Nations Foundation where he raised and managed more than $30 million in corporate partnerships in support of the UN's disaster and development efforts. Simon is also responsible for helping to establish the Global Water Challenge.

Simon is an active climber and runner, placing 2nd in the San Francisco Marathon. In 2007, Simon ran on foot around the world as part of the Blue Planet Run to raise awareness and funds for the drinking water cause. In January, 2010, Simon climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with several celebrities and global influencers which is also part of a clean-water focused campaign. Simon is a expert blogger for Fast Company and is currently writing a book on cause-marketing.

Paolo Bacigalupi '90 Author of The Windup Girl named by TIME Magazine as a Top 10 novel of 2009
Paolo Bacigalupi's writing often focuses on cheery environmental and social themes such as GM foods, ecosystem collapse, drought, global warming, poverty, and industrial pollution. His short fiction has appeared High Country News, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It has been nominated for four Hugo Awards, the Nebula Award, and has won the LOCUS Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His debut novel The Windup Girl was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and his short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories was a 2008 LOCUS Award winner for Best Collection and also named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he writes full-time.

Margaret T. Miller '90 In just a little over a decade in the production business, Mags Miller has been involved in an impressive number of high-profile human interest and natural history projects for various Discovery Channels including, TLC, Animal Planet, Science Channel, FitTV, as well as National Geographic, and HGTV. In the last six years alone, Mags has Produced “The Point of Three Kings: Point Reyes National Seashore”, “Land of Revolutions: The National Parks of Massachusetts” for Discovery, “Ms. Adventure” for Animal Planet, the “Mega Machines” Series for TLC, and field produced for National Geographic’s “Deadly Dozen II”, “Paranormal” and “Taboo” series.

In the past year alone she has produced a video for the Gede Foundation, a Nigerian HIV/AIDS Non-profit, field produced for three series, and produced a one hour show for National Geographic’s Explorer, where she embedded with the US Marines for 5 weeks in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Zimbabwe, as well as extended stays in Thailand, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Vietnam, Fiji and Cape town, South Africa. She has quickly become one of the most trusted producers to book. She has a desire to use her talents to create meaningful and lasting work not only for TV, but also for the Global community at large. She believes that through visual storytelling, people’s eyes can be opened and minds can be expanded to help encourage positive change.

Susan Meiselas '66 is an internationally acclaimed photojournalist who has been published in Time, the New York Times, Life, and Paris Match. She earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her work covering the violence in Central America during the insurrection was published worldwide. She has been a freelance photographer with Magnum Photos since 1976 and was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for outstanding courage and reporting by the Overseas Press Club in 1979 for her work in Nicaragua. Other awards include: the Leica Award for Excellence, the Photojournalist of the Year Award from the ASMP, a Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Two books have resulted from her photo essays, and she has completed two films. Her work appears in numerous photo compilations. One-woman shows of her work have been held in New York, Chicago, London, Stockholm, and Paris, and she has taken part in a wide variety of traveling group shows.

M. Tamim Ansary '66 was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1948—son of the first Afghan ever to marry an American woman, and the first American woman to live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. Tamim moved to America in 1964 to attend CRMS and later graduated from Reed College. After a stint as an editor with the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, he traveled in the Islamic world during the “hostage crisis” of 1980. After he came home, Tamim worked as an editor for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for nine years, then freelanced for major textbook publishers. He wrote the Islam chapters in World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell’s high school world history textbook). His children’s nonfiction books include Afghanistan, Cool Collections, Holiday Histories, and Native Americans. Tamim conceived and wrote a series of educational comic books called Adventures Plus and has a regular monthly humanities column now at www.encarta.com. Last year he published his memoir, West of Kabul, East of New York, went to Pakistan to deliver relief aid in the Afghan refugee camps, and traveled to Afghanistan.

Topher Delaney '66, a landscape designer based in San Francisco, has become nationally known for her designs of healing gardens. She designed a roof garden for the Bank of America building in San Francisco, where overworked employees have been known to go and sleep during their breaks. After a bout with breast cancer, she realized that hospitals lacked a place where patients could feel connected to nature and the outside world. Topher now dedicates her work to creating places that help people feel that comforting, rejuvenating connection.

Oliver Platt ’78 attended CRMS for three years. He then went on to Tufts, where he majored in drama at Tufts University and made his professional stage debut. His credits in film, television, and theater have been numerous. He made his film debut in 1988 in Married to the Mob; other film credits include Flatliners (1990), Indecent Proposal (1993), Benny & Joon (1993), The Three Musketeers (1993), Simon Burch (1998), The Impostors (1998), Lake Placid (1999), and Gun Shy (2000). He has guest-starred on the television series The West Wing, The Equalizer, Miami Vice, and Wiseguy. Recently Oliver acted in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

Conrad Anker ’81 is a leading figure in the climbing world and spends much of his time on global environmental concerns. He is a professional mountaineer who has made breakthrough first ascents in climbing meccas such as the Himalayas, Antarctica, Patagonia. He enjoys technically demanding, steep climbing and taking these skills to the mountains. He co-authored the book Lost Explorer, which describes his discovery of George Mallory’s body on Mount Everest; it was a recent all-school read. Conrad works for North Face, an outdoor equipment and clothing company. He is on the board of the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, the American Alpine Club, the Rowell Fund for Tibet, and Conservation Alliance. Conrad has a B.A. from the University of Utah.

Peter Olenick '02 is one of America's foremost freeskiers. He specializes in super pipe and slopestyle events, and in the 2004 X Games in Aspen he won the silver medal in slopestyle and the bronze medal in superpipe. He has attended Montana State University in Bozeman, and he currently skis for Team Obermeyer, competing and appearing in ski films by directors as renowned as Warren Miller.