The Fulbright Program - U.S. Department of State

Donald Vermeil, Member, Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board Donald Vermeil
Vice Chair

In 1981, Donald Vermeil was a founding partner of Renco Properties, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, a commercial property company, developing, owning and managing properties for its own account. He retired from the company in September of 2006. In 1976, he was a founding partner of Devcon Construction, Inc., a commercial property developer and general contractor for commercial buildings. From 1974 to 1976, he served as a vice president for United California Mortgage, a division of United California Bank, responsible for the underwriting and origination of construction loans and placement of long-term loans for commercial projects.

In 1994, Vermeil became an active Board Member of Shoot for the Stars, Inc. (SFTS), a nonprofit organization focused on improving educational opportunities for at-risk youth, primarily from the East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park communities of California. In 1996, SFTS opened Eastside College Preparatory School to offer students a college prep curriculum with the goal of having its graduates attend four-year colleges. Eastside has grown from eight freshmen in 1996 to 220 students in grades 6 through 12. The school has had five graduating classes and all graduates have gone on to attend four-year colleges, including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Tufts, Mills College, and Santa Clara University. In addition to serving as a Board Member, Vermeil's volunteer activities for Eastside have included tutoring, land acquisition, site planning and architecture, entitlement work, building construction and fundraising.

Donald Vermeil holds a B.A. degree in Psychology from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He is married to Anne Webb and they have three grown children. Vermeil was appointed to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board by President Bush in 2002 and reappointed to a second term in 2005.

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