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As I recall, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer
when I was 9 years old. I'm a double-barrelled second
generation academic (my father was a professor of
biochemistry at SUNY-Buffalo, my mother is a geneticist
at Roswell Park Memorial Institute), so I knew what
I was getting into. I received my B.S. degree in
Astronomy
from the California
Institute of Technology in 1982, my M.S. (1984)
and Ph.D. (1987) in
Astronomy from the
University of Washington.
Since then, I've been wandering around the country
for longer than I care to think about. I have held
various positions at Astronomy and Physics Departments
throughout the U.S. including the University of Illinois, Dudley
Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
and the University of Alabama. I
was most recently a Research Associate in the Deparment of Astronomy,
The Ohio
State University where I worked on the Ohio
State Spiral Galaxy Survey with Jay
Frogel. In August 2001 I began a faculty appointment
at Minnesota
State.
My research interest in the properties of galaxies
goes back to an undergraduate project with Wal Sargent
and Fred Lo at Caltech. That general focus continued
through my graduate work with Paul Hodge at the
University of Washington, and has kept up as a unifying
theme ever since. I have had the pleasure of working
with a lot of good and clever people on a huge range
of problems. A smattering includes the distribution
of stars in halo dwarf galaxies, the abundances
of extragalactic HII regions, the structure of disk
galaxies, the multiphase ISM of ellipticals, and
the distribution of star forming regions in galaxies.
For me, the central thread in all of those areas
is the formation and evolution of structure in the
Universe. A sort of inversion of the classic way
of thinking about the problem: Rather than start
with a thin soup of gas, and try to predict what
it will do, I like to look at the end results and
try to figure them out. You can't figure out how
you got here until you know where you are.
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