Think Oregon

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David Logsdon: Brewer

David Logsdon discovered yeast while in college. No, in a good way. At Mt. Hood Community College in the late 1970s, Logsdon studied food science and fermentation. Disappointed with beers on the West Coast, the native Ohioan began home brewing. His first was a stout, which he had just finished before his father, brought up in the Midwestern lager tradition, visited. The elder tasted the dark liquid and then declared, ‘Well it’s not beer, but it’s not bad,’ says Logsdon. So began Logsdon’s lifelong specialization with beer’s key ingredient—yeast. He continued to experiment with yeast and beer, before the industry was well developed. “The first hops I found were at G.I. Joes on the shelf in a brown paper bag,” Logsdon recalls. “They were as brown as the paper bag.” At the same time, Logsdon started collecting yeast strains from breweries and began culturing his own brewer’s yeast. By 1985,…

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Cory Carman: Rancher

Star chef Vitaly Paley walked in and Cory Carman’s hopes walked right out. “He said, ‘I will try your sample, but I will tell you, I don’t like grass-fed beef,’” Carman recounts as Paley’s opening sentiments. “Well, he tried it, and he’s been a customer ever since.” Likewise the chefs at Beast, Laughing Planet, the University of Portland, Lewis & Clark College, and Oregon Health & Scienc University also began serving Carman Ranch’s grass-fed beef after tasting it themselves. Growing up on a traditional ranch run by her uncle, Carman set off for Stanford University and a subsequent spell in Washington, D.C. “I thought that I would come back to the ranch when I retired,” says Carman, 33. “I thought I would be involved in agriculture policy and international development work.” It was under the tutelage of sustainable agriculture icon, Stanford professor Walter Falcon, that the traditional Eastern Oregon ranch…

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Alan Scholz: Portable bike builder

A self-described serial entrepreneur, Alan Scholz has built his life and businesses around his love affair with bicycles. CEO of Green Gear Cycling and maker of Bike Friday in Eugene, Scholz has converted his passion into dozens of innovations for cyclists worldwide. “I’m out on a ride, going 40 mph downhill, and I’m thinking of how to design a bike so others can experience the thrill,” he says. Scholz, 61, opened his first bike shop at age 17 in the garage of his parent’s North Dakota home. At 19, he borrowed his mother’s sewing machine and stitched together a carrying bag that would fit on his bike. He peddled the resulting product, the Burley Bike Bag, at the Eugene Saturday Market as a young father, but had difficulty getting his infant daughter there safely on his bicycle. So he invented a safe and durable child trailer—the Burley Lite. The success…

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Xihou Yin: Scientist

A new biotech company in Corvallis, AGAE Technologies, makes ecofriendly products that may change the world by helping clean up contaminated sites and toxic waste dumps, simultaneously boosting yields from older oil wells. Senior research scientist Xihou Yin, Ph.D., of Oregon State University’s College of Pharmacy, identified a strain of bacteria that produces molecules called rhamnolipid biosurfactants. These molecules have widespread applications, including removal of heavy metals from contaminated soils and recovering hardto- extract oil from mature wells. Rhamnolipids also offer biodegradable green solutions for cosmetics, shampoo and soaps, as well as organic food production and pharmaceuticals. Yin, who came to OSU in 1997, and his team at AGAE (American Green Agricultural and Environmental) Technologies, were the first to work out an efficient and cost-effective process to produce highly purified rhamnolipids in large quantities. This had eluded researchers worldwide since 1949, when rhamnolipids were originally discovered. Researchers have long sought…

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Heather Straw: Jewelry designer

Jewelry designer, mom and business woman extraordinaire, designer Heather Straw was selling about $1,000 a month in handmade jewelry when she attended a trade show in Las Vegas in 2005. In two days, she sold $43,000 and knew that her life was about to change. “I was a young mom, I’d just lost my shop in downtown Bend, and I was terrified about the future,” she says. “I gave my boyfriend, now my husband, the stack of orders, and we started filling them in our home.” Nashelle Jewelry soon had five employees working in her living room. In 2006, she leased an industrial-sized bay on Bend’s east side to house a showroom and work area. The business grew at warp speed, today encompassing six industrial bays and twenty to thirty employees, depending on the season. More than 400 boutiques worldwide carry the Nashelle and Nash (for men) lines. Nashelle rings,…

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Margarette Leite & Sergio Palleroni: Sustainable architects

Margarette Leite and her husband, Sergio Palleroni, were already looking into ways to make schools more sustainable when their daughter started fourth grade in a portable classroom at Portland’s Sunnyside Environmental School. A lot of the parents were concerned about putting their kids in a portable classroom for the year. There were air quality issues and the potential for “sick building syndrome,” an illness thought to be related to chemical contaminants and inadequate ventilation. Architects and Portland State University professors both, Leite and her husband set out to remedy the problem by designing affordable and sustainable portable classrooms. In 2009, at the university, they convened a day of activism called Rethinking the Portable Classroom. “We kind of threw everything at the topic,” says Leite. Out of this came a prototype with solar-powered ventilation, larger windows for day-lighting, low- and no-VOC finishes, and sheet rock that actively converts VOCs into safe…

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Jo Hamilton: Crochet artist

A wall of yarn is her palette, a steel hook her brush. With these, Portland artist Jo Hamilton crochets a new twist on an ancient craft with elaborate cityscapes and portraits that unravel crochet as granny craft. By painting in yarn, Scottish-born Hamilton, 41, blends fine art training from the Glasgow School of Art with the craft she learned from her “gran.” She moved to Portland in 1996, and painted in oil and watercolor for almost twenty years, but says, “I hadn’t found my medium.” In 2006, inspiration struck at a nontraditional show of tapestry, sewing and embroidery at the Contemporary Craft Museum (now the Museum of Contemporary Craft). She went home, picked up the crochet hook and began a cityscape of Portland that took years to complete. Next were the portraits—friends, coworkers and even dogs. “Portland excites and inspires me to do unsanctioned things and not think about what…

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Memorable Faces

One Oregon artist seeks meaning and familiarity in the faces of others.