The twelve Directors of the Cryonics Institute Board are elected for three years in groups of four every September at the Annual General Meeting held at the Cryonics Institute facility.

Here are the candidates for 2007, listed in alphabetical order.

R.A. ('Royse') Brown was born in and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was educated at Howe Military in the Florida Keys, and at Washington, D.C.

He holds a BA in Foreign Affairs, a Masters in History, Interdisciplinary Ph.D. work in the social foundations of university administration, Ed.D work in urban education, and postgraduate work in medicine, law ("and whatever").

Royse has served as parliamentarian to his faculty senate, and on various educational and community Boards of Directors. A life member of the Ohio Retired Teacher's Association, Royse is also a member of the University of Cincinnati Alumni Association, the AARP, the Ohio Gun Collectors Association, and the NRA.

Royse has travelled on all continents, has lived in Alaska, California, Florida, and Hawaii, is multilingual, and since 1988 has held a dual citizenship as a Costa Rican. His hobbies are exploring overseas investment and business opportunities, finding backyard places to dock sailboats, politics, and continuing to savor the noble joys of bachelorhood.

Some years back Royse, as he puts it, "read about Bob Ettinger, and decided to drive to Michigan and look him up". Within two hours of hearing about cryonics and meeting Bob and his wife Mae, Royse toured CI and joined both the Immortalist Society and CI on the spot, and signed and fully funded his suspension on the spot with American Express travelers' check, thus setting a record in becoming our first and fastest cash-prepaid cryonics member.

He's been a CI Director and Officer for several years, but Royse has also been notable as a roving ambassador, fraternizing with, and encouraging donations to, most other cryonics organizations and activities.

He can be contacted at rabrown2001@aol.com

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An active member of the Astronomical Society of East Texas (ASET), Jim Fitzgerald serves on the Astronomy Program Advisory Committee at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas. As an amateur Egyptologist, he's also a member of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), Southern Methodist University Chapter, in Dallas.

Though now a Texan, Jim was originally born in Detroit, Michigan, and retired at the young age of 52. As he says, "I was aware of the concept of cryonics, but thought it was cost-prohibitive. Then I saw a special on the Discovery Channel... "

Jim eventually contacted Robert Ettinger, who invited him to one of CI's annual meeting, and Jim and the other participants were mutually impressed. Said Jim later in an Immortalist interview, "I felt that somewhere down the road, it would be much more important to be with people where one had a feeling of friendship, camaraderie, and a sense of family. The intangibles are more important. The way I've been accepted and made to feel part of this CI family by Bob, Mae (God rest her soul), Andy, David, and everyone else, made my decision for me."

Jim currenly lives in Texas with his wife and children, and has become a college student again, focusing on the subject of physics. He can be contacted at jfit127@sulross.edu

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(Robert) Alan Mole was born in Baltimore in 1943. He earned a BS in Civil Engineering at the University of Denver and an MS (Structural Stress Analysis) at the University of Colorado in 1971.

After a career as an aerospace stress analyst, an engineer who determines whether rockets and satellites will break, he is now semi-retired.

His background in Biology consists of a high school class, plus reading Stryer's Biochemistry and books by Darnel et al and Alberts et al, on molecular cellular biology, to learn of later advances. And reading Scientific American etc., so as to be conversant with current work.

His retirement is not idle, and he has wide interests. He has written about how to terraform Mars, one idea good enough to be quoted by Buzz Aldrin in Encounter with Tiber (page 539.) He has considered ways to get to the stars, and noted that it is prohibitively expensive and impractical to feed people on a forty-year trip, so cold sleep will be a critical technology. This was the origin of his interest in cryonics.

Another interest is linguistics, and he wrote translator program for notebook computers, to allow you to converse with people if you go, say, to Hungary but don't speak Hungarian. Ambiguous words destroy understanding if they are translated wrong, so the program asks you for the meaning every time you use one. ("Charge" as in which meaning? 1. Charge my card. 2. Charge the battery 3. Charge him with murder.) You know what you mean so you type in the correct number and the translation comes out right. This means you have to be there to answer such questions, so it can't translate Web pages letters where the authors are not present. The program works well, but unfortunately people want to translate Web pages and don't want to converse, so it is not a financial success.

Alan Mole is also president of a small society for the reform of English spelling. (Our spelling is a corrupt bane that doubles our illiteracy rate and requires us to spend years learning to read and write, while others spend just two weeks.) The American Literacy Council has about twenty active members, though most of them are very old, and a fair sized endowment. As president for two years he has thought a lot on how to get the most out of this small organization, and how to revive this once-popular cause. This is good preparation for working with Cryonics Institute, another small organization with similar problems in promoting a cause that is not well known.

Alan can be contacted at ramole@aol.com

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Marta Sandberg was born in Sweden in 1955, but has lived all her adult life in Australia.

Marta has a wide-ranging fascination with science and studied mathematics for her first degree. She more recently acquired another degree, this time in accountancy (B.Bus.). In Australia the university accountancy degree gives her full stature as an accountant, even without the professional-body certifications (CPA, Certified Practicing Accountant or CA, Chartered Accountant). She may gain these certifications in the course of her working or she may return to university to get a PhD.

In 2007 she moved north from her former residence near Perth to start working for the Marra Worra Worra Aboriginal Corporation in Fitzroy Crossing as a Managerial Accountant. It is very small town in the top western corner of Australia. She finds her new job extremely challenging, job so her work is still her passion and interest.

However soon after moving to Fitzroy Crossing she joined the local State Emergency Services team and enrolled for art classes. Other hobbies include swimming; reading almost anything; scuba diving (but there aren't a lot of opportunities when she currently lives on the edge of a desert) and unsuccessfully trying to cultivate snotty gobbles (look it up, she says).

Her interest in cryonics was sparked in her early thirties by reading an article in ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION/SCIENCE FACT about the Dora Kent case. It made the whole endeavor seem real. When her husband Helmer had a brush with death she nearly phoned a cryonics organization, but he managed to recover. She stopped thinking about cryonics, but happened to read ENGINES OF CREATION by Eric Drexler and was stunned by the power of the arguments. While Helmer struggled with several more severe medical conditions Marta struggled to persuade him to be cryopreserved until he agreed.

Helmer wanted to see the CI facility before he died. As it turned out he was too ill to be able to travel back to Australia, so he died in Detroit. He died in a rented apartment while under hospice care. He is currently stored with CI and one day she plans to join him.

This gives her a very personal interest in securing the future of cryonics and safeguarding her and her husband’s next life. On the whole she approves of CI's "slow and steady" approach and doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being ultra-cautious when dealing with human lives over an indefinite time span.

Marta can be contacted at martasandberg99@hotmail.com

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John K. Strickland, Jr. was born in New York City during the Second World War. He lived for 30 years in western New York state where he received a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Biology from S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo in 1967. He moved to a spot just outside Austin, Texas in 1976, and earned a second B.A. in Computer Science from St. Edwards University in Austin in 1986. He also earned graduate credits in both Anthropology and Biology. He has been a professional programmer / analyst since 1980, and has been employed by the State of Texas in Austin since July, 1989.

John has been an active member of space and science related organizations from 1961 (when he joined the American Rocket Society as a student member) to the present. He created the Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award for the National Space Society (NSS) in 1988, (shortly after that author's death), and has managed the award from then to the present. His work with pro-space organizations brought him into contact in 1976 with Keith Henson, a well-known supporter of Cryonics and space settlement, and later K. Eric Drexler, another space activist who later made promoting nano-technology his life’s work. Drexler early pointed out the possibility of future nano-assisted medical repairs which validated the basic concept of cryonics. John has been a supporter of Drexler’s Foresight Institute from the beginning, and notes that the pro-space, pro-technology and pro-life extension groups all have a compatible and "positivist" philosophy. He has a full contract with C.I. His position is one of pragmatism in the service of idealism. In Theodore Roosevelt’s words, this means "keeping your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground".

Since 1976, he has produced articles and op-eds for "The Humanist", "L5 News", "Ad Astra", "Space News", "Solar Power" and for other local and regional publications. His articles have focused primarily on national space policy, access to space, and space solar power. His creation of a slide show and talk in 1990 which explains and promotes Space Solar Power to non-technical audiences led to the publication of his first technical SSP article in 1995, and a second in 1996. He served as the director for science and space programming (about 50 events) at the 1997 LoneStarCon World Science Fiction Convention. He contributed a comprehensive chapter on energy systems in the book, "Solar Power Satellites - a Space Energy System for Earth", edited by Dr. Peter Glaser et al., and published by Wiley-Praxis in 1998. He since has contributed several additional technical papers and presentations to the Mars Society 1999 Convention, the Wireless Power Transmission Conference of 2001, and the World Space Congress in 2002. He is a director of the Sunsat Energy Council and a candidate for an NSS director's seat. He has also been a moderate Delegate to the Texas State Republican Convention in 2000, 2002, AND 2004

John's involvement with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal (CSICOP) a national group working for better science coverage and less pseudo-science in the mass media, has given him a unique debunker's perspective in dealing with energy vs. environment and other controversial issues. In 1981 he was one of 3 founders of the Protect Lake Travis Association of Austin, Texas, and still serves on its board of directors. As well, John is a Director of the National Space Society. He has been a member of the National Speleological Society since 1964 and a member of the Heart of Texas Orchid Society since 1976. He also enjoys reading History, Science Fiction and Science.

John can be reached at jkstrick@io.com

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