| Biographical Profile |
In her long career as an investigative reporter, Karen Dorn Steele unmasked nuclear secrecy and won a series of major national reporting awards for The Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s daily newspaper. Some of her most significant work involved reporting on national security topics. In the 1980s, she broke the long-suppressed story of Hanford’s radiation emissions during World War II and the Cold War – including the secret exposures of downwind civilian populations in the 1940s and ‘50s and the Green Run, a 1949 military experiment that deliberately spread dangerous radiation throughout the inland northwest with no public warning. During the 1986-87 academic year, based on her Hanford reporting, Dorn Steele held joint appointments at Stanford University, where she was a Stanford Knight Fellow in an international program for mid-career journalists and an Arms Control Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1992, she was awarded a year-long research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Peace and International Cooperation, enabling her to travel to Siberia to visit the former Soviet Union’s Hanford equivalent near Chelyabinsk, where workers and citizens were also exposed to radiation during the nuclear arms race. After the federal government was forced to begin cleaning up Hanford’s legacy of nuclear contamination, she and colleague Jim Lynch won the 1994 George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for a five-part series on squandered taxpayer money in the $7.5 billion Hanford cleanup, which continues today at the cost of $1 billion a year. She later worked on other national security topics, including the controversial role of two Spokane-based psychologists in the CIA’s “renditioning” and torture programs post-9/11 and the operations of the National Security Agency’s large monitoring station near Yakima, Washington. She also covered police reform issues and wrote stories that triggered the recall of a controversial Spokane mayor, Jim West, on her investigative reporting beat. She took a buyout from The Spokesman-Review in 2009. Her volunteer activities including serving on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane and as advocacy chair for Spokane Preservation Advocates, a historic preservation group. In 2016, she was elected co-president of the Spokane Alliance, a 27,000-member group working for social and economic change, after working with the group to pass the city’s first mandatory Sick & Safe Leave ordinance. That new law, approved by the Spokane City Council in January 2016, has provided earned sick and safe leave to 40,000 low-income workers in the city since 2017. In March 2018, she was honored with a “Watershed Hero” award from the Sierra Club’s Upper Columbia Chapter and the Center for Environmental Law & Policy for her reporting career, including her Hanford work and investigative stories on the massive pollution of the Upper Columbia River by Teck Cominco, a large Canadian smelter located in Trail, B.C. In 2019, Dorn Steele collaborated on a book on Hanford’s radiation victims with attorney Trisha Pritkin. The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices From The Fight For Atomic Justice was published in 2020 by the University Press of Kansas. It has won seven awards for non-fiction, including from the Nautilus Book Awards and the San Francisco, Los Angeles, New England and Paris, France Book Festivals. Dorn Steele graduated with honors in history from Stanford University and holds a master’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley. She has two daughters and is married to Richard D. Steele, PhD. The name of my father, Warren Nelson Steele, Jr. ’32, is inscribed on the wall of Stanford’s Memorial Hall, for he was an alumnus who died in military service during World War II. Following the war’s end, the University contacted the spouses of all those alumni, extending the offer to cover four years of tuition for sons or daughters who earned admission to Stanford. That opportunity focused my attention on Stanford as my college of choice while attending public schools in southern California. And upon completing secondary education, I was 1 of 5 seniors – from a graduating class of 2,000 – to travel from L.A.’s University High School to The Farm to pursue higher education. From the outset, I structured my course choices at Stanford to pursue a physics major; but I also came close to completing a math major, as well as a Russian major. I loved the richness of Stanford’s offerings and regularly was granted petitions to take heavier course loads. My very first Stanford class – at 8 AM on the first Monday of the 1960 Fall Quarter – was beginning Russian with Mr. Pashin, a very sweet, cultured émigré in a Slavic Department that comprised numerous refined and sometimes literally aristocratic instructors. And while I carried through, graduating in 1964 with a BS in Physics, cum laude, following election in junior year to Phi Beta Kappa, I decided not to pursue a career in physics. Rather, I participated during the summer of 1964 in a Russian language study tour conducted by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), visiting cities around the Soviet Union including Moscow, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Riga, and Leningrad (since 1991, again St. Petersburg) and Novgorod, returning to pursue graduate studies in September 1964 in Harvard’s Department of Slavic Language and Literatures. Its chair, Horace G Lunt, had written the Fundamentals of Russian textbook I’d learned from at Stanford. In 1966, I received my MA, and in 1973 my PhD in Slavic Languages and Linguistics, having written my doctoral dissertation on Polish phonology. But after about a dozen years in academia, I decided to strike out on a new path that would allow me better to combine my past accomplishments, acquired skills, interests, and passions. That led me back to Palo Alto. In the late 1970’s, Prof. Larry Leifer with colleagues from Stanford had founded the Rehabilitation Research and Development Center at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center on Foothill Blvd south of Stanford. It was jointly operated by the VA and Stanford, and its mission was to adapt emerging technologies to rehabilitation purposes. I joined their staff and soon became Research Health Scientist, serving as principal investigator on a multi-year project to research and develop high technologies for the rehabilitation of aphasia, a family of acquired speech-language-communication disorders. In 1990, to commercialize our discoveries and inventions, I helped found the startup company that has become Lingraphica. Our headquarters are now in Princeton, NJ, it boasts over 100 employees, and I maintain a half-time work schedule as chief scientist. I feel very fortunate in the richness of my life, in part inspired by Leland Stanford’s expressed desire in founding Stanford – to honor the memory of his son by educating persons who will take on the practical work of bettering the world.
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