A native San Franciscan, Frances K. Geballe is the daughter of Daniel E. Koshland, Sr., who together with brother-in-law Walter A. Haas, Sr. helped elevate Levi Strauss, the retail company, into a multi-billion dollar powerhouse, serving as CEO from 1955–58 and honorary board chairman until his death in 1979. For decades Koshland and Haas have been mainstays of San Francisco philanthropy and civic life (Koshland indeed founded The San Francisco Foundation), and Frances has followed closely in her family tradition. Theodore H. Geballe is professor emeritus in the departments of Applied Physics and Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he began work in 1968. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in England, member of the Solid State Physics Delegation to the People’s Republic of China and recipient of the Bernd Matthias Memorial and Von Hippel awards, both for his superconductor research. He is author or co-author of more than 400 scientific publications. Frances K. and Theodore H. Geballe are well known in the San Francisco Bay Area for their unparalleled support of Jewish programs and institutions. Many Jewish educational and communal programs bear the Koshland and Haas names, for example, the permanent Haas Koshland Endowment Fund, providing scholarships for year-long study in Israel. The Geballes also provided lead support to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, which prides itself on being an innovative,
multimedia museum and which recently forged a partnership with the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The Geballes became enthusiastic San Francisco patrons of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose powerful narrative and cutting-edge technology will give audiences worldwide exciting encounters with a millennium of Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas.