Officers

The 2012-2014 members of the OSCF Board were elected at the 7th Annual OSCF State Championship in Seaside, Oregon, on April 28, 2012.  To reach the board, use this form – we look forward to hearing from you!

Jeff Dobbins, President
Jeff Dobbins is a law professor at Willamette University. He’s been the coach and advisor for the Rieke Elementary chess club for five years, and in the last two years has also taken on responsibilities for the Robert Gray Middle and Wilson High School chess teams. He’s been to every OSCF State Tournament with his son and, in recent years, his daughter. He has assisted with TDing at many tournaments and is working to help bring OSCF qualifying tournaments to every corner of the State.

Henry Carstens, Vice President
Henry is the owner of Vertical Solutions, a market forecasting company for professional traders. Henry was the chess coach at the Portland Jewish Academy for 5 years where he saw kids soak up and run with the life lessons taught by scholastic chess (practice makes you better is his favorite). He also saw his kids stagnate when they didn’t move on to tournament play. This year Henry and Roza Kotlyar helped two students start offering Sunday scholastic quads at the Portland Chess Club to broaden the calendar of available tournaments for scholastic players. Henry is interested in building a vibrant community of active scholastic players and the tournaments that will help them improve.

Steven Cousineau, Treasurer
Steve is a power resource scheduler with Iberdrola Renewables. He sometimes moonlights as the bookkeeper for his wife’s law practice. He has four children who enjoy playing chess as an antidote to wrestling. He has assisted in coaching the Charles F. Tigard chess team for the past 3 years. In addition, he runs rated tournaments through the Tigard Grange. When he’s not encouraging children to play a fair and thoughtful game of chess, he can often be found running on the trails around his neighborhood.

Yuchen Huang, Member at Large
Yuchen is an engineer and a chess mom. All three of her sons play chess, the two older sons are active Oregon chess players, and the youngest five year old son plays chess at home with his brothers and her. Yuchen sees chess as not only a good recreational game for life but also a tool to train youngsters in building strong character, to act calmly and move with efficiency under pressure, and to handle winning and losing with grace. Yuchen’s goal as an OSCF Board member is to bring chess to more schools, especially to high schools where the numbers of chess players are significantly less than that of elementary and middle schools, and to increase collaboration with OHSCTA (Oregon High School Chess Team Association), to create more playing opportunities for scholastic players, and to contribute to the success and vision of OSCF. Yuchen was born in Shanghai, China. She has a bachelor’s  and a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. She has worked at Intel Corporation for the past 18 years where currently as a senior engineer with Intel Architecture Lab she leads a cross-divisional engineering team.

Dr. Roza Kotlyar, Member at Large
Roza is a Staff Research Scientist at the Logic Technology Development of Intel. She is doing physics modeling of electronic transport in transistors. Roza has been playing chess competitively since age 5. She became the Junior Girl Champion of the Latvian Open Girl Championship in 1985. As a graduate of a State Chess Sport School, Roza was certified as a Tournament Director in the USSR. She came to New York in 1990, where she studied at the NYU. While a graduate student, she played for the University of Maryland Chess Team. After moving to Oregon, having her son Seth, and working for Intel, Roza has rekindled her interest in chess. Recently, to expand opportunities for kids in Portland to play chess, Roza has become a USCF certified Club Level TD and has been co-running Sunday Chess Quads ChessWorks Tournaments at the Portland Chess Club. As an OSCF board member, Roza is interested to continue organizing opportunities for rigorous scholastic chess tournaments, as well as for fun chess.