Paul Castleman

1942 - 2018

Paul Castleman, 76, of San Francisco, formerly of Lexington, died on March 19, 2018 from a brain tumor. Paul is survived by his wife, Linda Blackstone of San Francisco, and his three children, a daughter Rabbi Jennie Rosenn (Rabbi David Rosenn) of NYC, son Dr. Tony Castleman (Rajni Joshi) of Takoma Park MD (temporarily of Delhi, India), and son Rabbi Seth Castleman (Rev Elizabeth Griswold) of Davis CA. Paul also leaves 6 grandchildren, two sisters, Ruth Griffin of Rochester NY and Jean Chase of St Louis MO, and his former wife Sally (Teitelbaum) Castleman of Lexington. Paul worked for more than 25 years at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, beginning in the early 1960s, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. Much of his work was in the application of computers to hospital systems and medical, biomedical and pharmaceutical research and data management. He also led teams that developed one of the first commercial parallel processing systems. He was described by a colleague as a thought leader as well as a manager. While at BBN, Paul managed and was Chairman, Vice-President and President of several company divisions and subsidiaries. After leaving BBN, Paul helped found and lead two successful medical software companies that worked in drug trials, safety, and/or informatics: Belmont Research, Inc. in 1990 and Lincoln Technologies, Inc. in 1999. At the time of his death, Paul was a senior advisor to Commonwealth Informatics, working on drug safety and healthcare informatics. Paul was very active in the Lexington Nuclear Freeze chapter, beginning in the mid-1980s. He continued to work on nuclear arms control for four decades, including as a member of the Board of Directors and congressional lobbyist for Council for a Livable World. In the mid-1990s Paul developed a program to strengthen management capacity among entrepreneurs and businessmen in the former Soviet Union. He also worked on several election campaigns, including those of Ed Markey, Bob Kerry, and Barack Obama. Paul lived in Lexington until 1992 and had lived in San Francisco since 1995. He had been a practitioner of Vipassana mindfulness meditation since 1995. Burial was on March 22 in California. Contributions in Pauls memory can be made to Council for a Livable World (livableworld.org), March for Our Lives (marchforourlives. org), Spirit Rock Meditation Center (spiritrock.org), or Laguna Honda Hospital (lagunahonda.org).