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  • Catherine J.K. Sandoval

    Catherine J.K. Sandoval was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in January 2011 to serve as a Commissioner at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Her appointment and confirmation to that post made her the first Latino to serve as a CPUC Commissioner in the agency's 100-year history. She serves as the Co-Vice-Chair of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Telecommunications Committee, on the NARUC Federalism and Telecommunications Committee, and on the NARUC Utility Market Access Committee. She is the Policy Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services. She has served since 2007 on the California Emerging Technology Fund Board of Expert Advisors. She is a tenured professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she joined the faculty in 2004 and taught Telecommunications, Broadcast, and Internet Law, Antitrust Law, and Contracts. As an Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley School of Law she taught Communications and Internet Law. She served as Undersecretary and Staff Director of the State of California's Business, Transportation, and Housing Agency, which oversaw 47,000 employees, and worked on California’s energy crisis, restructuring, and development of demand response programs from 2001-2004. She directed the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities and was a senior manager at the FCC from 1994-1999. In the private sector she was the Vice-President and General Counsel for Z-Spanish Media Corporation, a broadcast, Internet, and outdoor media company that merged with Entravision Communications, and was an Associate at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson. She clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after earning her J.D. from Stanford Law School. She earned a Masters of Letters in Politics from Oxford University in England where she was the first Latina to win a Rhodes Scholarship. She graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. from Yale University. She hails from East Los Angeles and Montebello, California, and lives with her husband in California's Silicon Valley.