"As a parent, I can well imagine how proud other parents must be to have their children attending UC Berkeley," says Matthew M. Lyon, 42, UC Berkeley's newly-appointed assistant vice chancellor for public affairs.

"At the same time, it isn't easy to escape the natural worries and concerns we have whenever our children are away from home. I want to help close that distance between campus and home. Parents are vital members of the Cal family, and a Berkeley education can be a lifelong touchstone for students and parents alike."

The son of an American Studies professor, Lyon grew up on college campuses -- in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina and at the five-college consortium centered in Amherst, Mass.

After graduating from Hampshire College in 1980, he became an associate editor for The Texas Observer, but soon embarked on a career in politics. He worked first with a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote effort in south Texas and eventually as chief speech writer for then-Texas governor Mark W. White.

In 1987 he signed on as national issues director for U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt's presidential bid.

Disenchanted with Washington, Lyon returned to Austin to work for a high-tech engineering firm as communications director. Then he grabbed the opportunity to return to the campus life he loved, as speech writer for Robert Berdahl, then president of the University of Texas at Austin. There, Lyon eventually took on many other aspects of campus and community public affairs.

"It was the best job I'd ever had," he recalls.

In 1994 Lyon reluctantly agreed to leave university life so that his wife, Katie Hafner, then a high-tech reporter for Newsweek and now with The New York Times, could be closer to Silicon Valley. He went to work at the San Francisco office of Public Strategies, Inc., helping corporate clients develop public affairs strategies.

Lyon and Hafner co-authored "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" (Simon & Schuster, 1996), a national bestseller named by Library Journal the best sci-tech book of the year.

Then Lyon heard about the public affairs job at Berkeley.

"The chance to work with a campus community again, particularly under the leadership of Bob Berdahl, was too good to pass up," he says.