Celebrating Black alumni

Among the hundreds of thousands of Sacramento State graduates are countless Black alumni who are making a positive impact in their community, region and the world.

During Black History Month, we highlight some of these alums – Hornets who are excelling in a variety of fields, often making history while doing so, and defining what it means to be Made at Sac State.

Lester Holt
Anchor, NBC Nightly News

Lester Holt came to Sacramento State to study Government and got his first taste of journalism while on campus. The University, he says, “set me off into the world.” Today, he is one of the world’s most respected broadcast journalists. In 2015, NBC named Holt anchor of NBC Nightly News, making him the first Black full-time anchor of a weekday nightly newscast. That same year, he received his honorary doctorate from his alma mater. Read more.

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Nicholas Haystings
Founder, Square Root Academy

Nicholas Haystings was the only person of color at all but one of the jobs he held after graduating from Sac State with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. If things were going to change, he knew a fundamental shift in education was needed. In 2016, he launched Square Root Academy, a nonprofit that provides STEM-based education and experiences to underrepresented fifth- through 12th-graders, all at no cost to the participants. In 2019, he was named among the Sacramento Business Journal’s“40 Under 40” young professionals. Read more.

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Elaine Welteroth
Best-selling author, journalist and television host

As a biracial woman, Elaine Welteroth rarely saw herself reflected in popular culture or the media. During her career as a journalist, author and TV host – often as the only woman of color in the room – she has worked to change that. As the groundbreaking editor of Teen Vogue, she amplified voices of color and built a more inclusive publication. Her best-selling book, More than Enough, offers lessons from her journey for future generations of girls and women. And as a judge on Project Runway and now co-host of The Talk, she’s helping change the face of television. Read more.

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Daniel Hahn
Sacramento chief of police

When Sacramento swears in a new police chief, it’s typically done at city hall. Daniel Hahn, however, chose to have his ceremony at a place near and dear to his heart: Sacramento State. It is where he earned a Marketing degree in 1995 while also serving as a Sacramento police officer. More than 20 years later, a crowd of more than 1,000 gathered in the University Union Ballroom to watch the Oak Park neighborhood native sworn in as the city’s first Black police chief. Read more.

Five Questions with emergency physician Jon Patane

The past few months for Jon Patane ’11 (Biochemistry) have, in his words, “definitely been interesting.”

Patane is an emergency medicine physician at Kaiser’s South Sacramento Medical Center, historically dealing with everyone from patients experiencing stroke and heart attack to mothers delivering babies in the parking lot.

Lately, though, one thing dominates his job.

“I’d say probably 50% to 75% of my patients are COVID-positive,” Patane said. “I spend a lot of my day walking back and forth to the protective equipment cart.”

Despite the difficulties, Patane remains upbeat, happy that he and his wife, a pharmacist, both have jobs, and that he can spend time with his kids and the family’s new border collie. He also says he still enjoys a job where he walks in the door never knowing what to expect that day.

Patane is a South San Francisco native who moved to Sacramento to attend Sac State. He earned his medical degree at UC Irvine, before returning to the capital region to begin his practice.

Below, he talks about his time at Sacramento State and his current work.

Made at Sac State: I know this has been an incredibly difficult year for you so far. How are you doing?

Jon Patane: It’s definitely been interesting. That’s an easy way to sum it up. Obviously, we’ve had our peaks of difficulty and our times that were a little bit less difficult. But there’s been just a few different struggles throughout the course of the year. As far as the protective equipment goes, for a while there were some issues with figuring out exactly what type of equipment was sufficient to properly protect us, and then obviously dealing with COVID patients in general. There was the mental portion of that where there’s a little bit of anxiety, taking care of some of those patients when this first started. We didn’t know too much about it. That’s dissipated away, but it’s also just been hard as far as impaction in our hospitals, our hospitals being full. Not just our hospital, but hospitals everywhere. It’s been difficult to kind of do the things that you want to do with your patients with the limitations that we have been having to deal with.

MASS: Why did you decide to attend Sac State?

Jon Patane, now an emergency medicine physician at Kaiser South Sacramento, graduated from Sacramento State with a degree in Biochemistry in 2011. (Photo courtesy Jon Patane)

JP: I looked at a few different schools leaving high school. My older sister was at Sac State, and so there was some familiarity. I had toured a couple different places. When I toured Sac State – it was actually the last one I toured – everybody just seemed so much more friendly. My sister walked us through the science building just to show us around, and I ended up running into the Chemistry department chair. I didn’t know that’s who it was, and just told her I was interested in going to school there. She gave me a personal tour and was just super friendly and took all this time out of her day just to show some random kid around. At the end, she told me she was a department chair, after giving us all this tour. I was like, oh, well, I’ll be a Chemistry major. It was just the sense of friendliness. Everybody seemed so happy on the campus compared to the other places, so for me it just seemed like it was going to be a better fit for my personality.

MASS: When did you know that you wanted to be a doctor?

JP: I went into college thinking that I’d be interested in it. I went in as a Chemistry major with a focus in Biochemistry, but that way I would have stuff to fall back on in case I didn’t want to go into medicine at the end of it. I’d say probably about my junior year is when I started getting a lot more serious about it. I did some volunteering while I was an undergrad. I did a surgical internship at UC Davis for an entire summer, and then I volunteered in the cardiology department at Davis for about a year and a half or so as an undergrad, just to make sure that that’s really what I wanted to go into.

MASS: What’s an average day look like right now?

JP: We do 10- or 11-hour shifts, so an average day would be me getting to work, getting ready to get on the computer, get everything signed in, and then essentially getting new patients for about eight or nine hours. Every day it kind of depends on what kind of patients come in. We’re on a patient assignment system, so some of it, in a way, is luck of the draw. There are usually five or six of us on at a time; it rotates between each doctor. I’m seeing patients for about eight hours. Especially in these last couple of weeks, I’d say probably 50% to 75% of my patients are COVID-positive, so that’s obviously a big thing. I spend a lot of my day walking back and forth to the protective equipment cart to get my visors and all that. Towards the end, it’s basically finishing up notes, getting everybody admitted, talking to my consultants, things like that. After work, just going home and trying to, you know, decompress. Hanging out with the kids, getting ready for bed, trying to get some sleep.

MASS: How do you feel Sac State prepared you to be a doctor?

JP: It was great. My class sizes were so much smaller than (classes attended by) all my colleagues. I went to UC Irvine for my med school. When I started there were, I think, 104 of us in my class. Out of the 104 people, only four of us came from a CSU. The other hundred were either from private schools or the UC system. I had so much smaller class sizes than these people who took basic Chemistry with, like, 700 people in the auditorium. I got much more individualized attention. I had a lot more research opportunity than if I would have been in a bigger, huge university. I think the individualized attention I got gave me the ability to learn the material a lot better. I felt like I was prepared great.

From intern to CEO: Paul Lau takes the reins at SMUD

Paul Lau ’84 (Electrical Engineering) was at Sacramento State preparing for dental school, but he also knew how to code. That knowledge landed him an internship in 1982 with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which provides electricity to the region.

That internship changed the course of his career.

Having already decided against dentistry, Lau was inspired to switch his major to Electrical Engineering.

Now, 38 years after walking through SMUD’s door as an intern, he has been named its chief executive officer. He officially took the reins of the community-owned utility on Oct. 3.

“When I worked for SMUD (in college), at the time I didn’t think I was going to be here 30 years,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, you know, it’s a good summer job …  a good job to help me pay the bills.’ ”

Lau calls himself an example of the “American success story.” Born in Hong Kong, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Nigeria when he was 9, then to Sacramento at age 12. One of his sisters already lived here, and his parents believed they all would have a better life in the United States.

Barely speaking English, he attended Valley Vista Junior High and Norte Del Rio High School. His sisters were nurses, so when it came time for college, he similarly targeted the medical fields and settled on dentistry.

Lau initially planned to attend UC Riverside after graduating from high school in 1979. But his sister was at Sacramento State and encouraged him to stay local. Upon touring the campus, he was struck by the diversity of its student body.

“There was a very big international presence of students from Hong Kong,” he said. “So when I walked on campus, I really felt, for lack of a better term, ‘Oh, this is a place I want to be at.’ ”

He became heavily involved in campus life, playing on the ping pong and table tennis team, working the games room, and serving as vice president for the Chinese Student Association.

Through his first two years, his eyes remained set on dentistry. Then he volunteered in a dental clinic at UC Davis Medical Center and realized he hated it. A classmate from a Physics course connected him to the SMUD internship, which led him to switch his major.

The Electrical Engineering courses, Lau said, were practical and designed to prepare students to hit the ground running once their careers began.

“The classes are very hands-on, the homework projects were pretty much like what you would do coming out in the industry and working in an electric utility or any one of those research companies,” he said.

Remarkably, Lau is not the only Electrical Engineering alum to be promoted recently to the head of a major utility company. In June, Caroline Winn ’85 was named CEO of San Diego Gas & Electric.

Their success is no surprise to Mahyar Zarghami, Electrical and Electronic Engineering chair, who oversees the top-ranked program.

“Sac State is proud to have established a strong program in the area of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,” he said. “Our EEE program is known for its reputable scholarship in fields such as power and energy systems and engineering. Paul and Caroline are wonderful examples of our distinguished alumni.”

Over the course of nearly four decades, Lau has served in several capacities at SMUD, including assistant general manager of Customer, Distribution and Technology; assistant general manager of Power Supply and Grid Operations; and most recently as chief grid strategy and operations officer.

As CEO, he will lead the nation’s sixth-largest community-owned electric utility, which provides power for Sacramento County and parts of Placer and Yolo counties.

“SMUD has always given me the opportunity and encouraged me to leave my comfort zone, to try different jobs,” Lau said. “It sounds like a very long time, 38 years. It didn’t feel long because I was always able to change jobs, learn new challenges and then get promoted into different areas.”

Lau said he relishes having a job where his work has an impact on the future of the community and where the company values – he points to its community focus and emphasis on renewable energy – are ones he shares.

They are values he can trace to his time as a Hornet.

“Working hard, giving back to the community, always serving the community, and always thinking about, long term, how can you actually help our community grow and make sure the community stays vibrant?” he said. “That’s, to me, what I learned from Sac State.”