Kelly Balamuth

Strange thing to mention first, maybe. But once you know that the genus Balamuthia — a rare freshwater amoeba first described in the scientific literature in 1993 — was named for Kelly’s paternal grandfather William Balamuth (1914–1981), an eminent protozoologist and Professor of Zoology at UC Berkeley, by his former graduate student Govinda Visvesvara, the rest of her bio starts to make more sense. (William Balamuth’s 114 hand-drawn illustrations of ciliates from the 1930s through the 1960s are preserved today in the Balamuth Collection at the University of Massachusetts.) Kelly’s grandmother Mollie Balamuth held court at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club, where she was a fixture of the Berkeley faculty community for decades. She also kept the lights on in William’s Biology lab — keeping the family’s Berkeley footprint anchored well beyond the lecture hall. Kelly comes from a family that has put down deep, public-record roots in the Bay Area for four generations — across courthouses, university campuses, and yes, a Wikipedia entry about an amoeba. The continuity in her work is the continuity in her family. Her family has provided legal counsel to the Bay Area community for more than fifty years — since her father, Barry Balamuth, graduated from UC Hastings College of the Law and was admitted to the California State Bar in 1972. Barry built his practice in Alameda County for two decades before opening the Contra Costa County firm Kelly now leads in 1993. Kelly’s great-grandfather, Judge Anderton, served on the bench in Alabama before the family came west. Kelly joined her father after her own graduation from King Hall, UC Davis School of Law, where she served as Research Editor on the Law Review. That was 1994. She has practiced continuously in Contra Costa County ever since — thirty-two years in the same community her family has served for more than five decades. Since 2020, her work has been devoted entirely to trust and estate planning. Her maternal great-grandmother was six years old when the 1906 earthquake struck San Francisco — newly arrived in California, watching the dishes shake off the shelves. The family never left. Apparently they liked it here enough that an earthquake wasn’t going to change their minds. Her maternal grandfather, Raymond Siefert, grew up on a chicken farm in the Santa Cruz mountains and became a mechanical engineer who ran Bay Area plants for Joseph Rosefield’s company in Alameda — the family business that turned Skippy peanut butter into a postwar pantry staple.