Full Biography for H. Engstrom

Herb Engstrom, democrat

After completing high school in the East Bay, he studied for one year in France before entering the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with a major in physics and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He became active in politics as an undergraduate and worked to support Berkeley's Fair Housing ordinance, which prohibited discrimination in housing on the basis of race. He participated in get-out-the vote drives providing transportation to the polls for disadvantaged, west Berkeley residents. He was also a volunteer teacher in the adult literacy program at San Quentin Prison.

Upon completing his undergraduate studies, he joined the Peace Corps and taught physics and science in a secondary school in Malaysia. This period afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout South East Asia, travels that took him to the Philippines, Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia at the time of the Viet Nam war. His intimate familiarity with this region provided a much deeper understanding of the problems in this area than he found in many Americans when he returned home.

After completing graduate school, again at U.C. Berkeley, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physics, he spent nine years doing fundamental research in solid state physics beginning with a 2-year post doctoral fellowship at the Univeristy of Paris at Orsay, France. In 1981 he and his family returned to California permanently settling in San Jose where he began working in the disk drive industry and later in the semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry.

He resumed his political activities and was elected president of the Santa Clara County Democratic Club, secretary of the 22nd Assembly District Committee, and member of the Democratic Party Central Committee.

He has been married for 26 years and has two children who are both adopted and both from Korea. His wife, Mary, is a teacher in the Mountain View school district. His son, Matthew, works, and daughter Katherine is a freshman at U.C. San Diego.