2024 Distinguished Alumna of the Year
First presented in 1978, the Scripps College Distinguished Alumna Award was established to celebrate the notable achievements of Scripps alumnae and to focus attention on Scripps’ role in the education of women. The award is presented each year during Reunion Weekend. Read about past recipients here.
Claire Sands Baker declared her major moments before the registrar’s deadline, choosing art history because she liked sitting in the dark and learning about history through images. The first decade of her career was dedicated to the arts in Montana and Portland, Oregon. She then moved toward promoting programming among rural and urban disadvantaged youth, and then into international work related to religious leaders, ecotourism, the economy, and species preservation. With each new endeavor, her work became increasingly transdisciplinary and dynamic. In 2014, Claire’s skills and interests collided with her father’s research on a parasitic weed found in parts of Africa, birthing the Toothpick Project, where she works at the intersection of agriculture, food security, economy, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurship, and the environment.
The Toothpick Project uses a novel biological technology to kill Striga, an invasive parasitic weed depleting the crop yields of 40 million African smallholder farms. Striga is the worst pest threat to African food security. Toothpick’s revolutionary and disruptive technology—one of the world’s first commercialized bioherbicides—uses a carefully selected fungal pathogen to kill the weed.
Toothpick has recently received notable accolades for its pilot program in Kakamega, Kenya, including the World Food Program Innovation Portfolio; a finalist position for the 2023 Food Planet Prize; a finalist position for the inaugural 2022 Milken-Motsepe Prize for Agritech; the 2021 United Nations Best Small Business: Good Food for All award; and the XPRIZE Future of Food Impact Roadmap Team. Claire was a Kravis Lab for Social Impact Moonshot Fellow at Claremont McKenna College and a guest instructor for CMC’s 2022 Leading Impact class. In 2023, Claire launched Kuvu Bio Solutions Inc., a platform biotech company dedicated to broadening and expanding the use of Toothpick’s bioherbicide technology. Claire and her team have several peer-reviewed publications on the Toothpick Project, and she has been globe-trotting to give presentations to industry leaders in the agriculture and food security sectors.
Claire is the sixth of ten family members who have attended The Claremont Colleges, ranging from her grandmother, Scripps ’34, to her niece, Scripps ’24. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her husband, two daughters, and two giant dogs. She tries to ski and raft when possible, but mostly keeps her head above water with the support of a strong network of girlfriends.