Pamela H. Atkinson is the Director of CalVIEW, the Virtual Instruction Program of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, an academic appointment. She was a Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, DC during 1987 and part of 1988, and served as study director and primary author of the national report, Focus on the Future: A National Action Plan for the Career-Long Education of Engineers. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Berkeley, and is currently on a leave of absence from a doctoral program in the School of Education at Berkeley, where she has completed all course-work for the doctorate. Her current research is on mentoring-enhanced distance education, mentoring as a retention strategy to ensure the completion of educational goals, and intellectual property issues in distance education as they effect the international sharing of educational content.