I attended Carleton College , a small liberal arts school in Northfield, Minnesota. I majored in physics and received a BA in 1984. I did my senior thesis on Hidden Vairables Theories and Bell's Inequality.

One month after graduating from Carleton I began serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I taught physics in Zaire now known as The Democratic Republic of the Congo. I taught physics at a Teachers College called L'Institut Superieur du Peadagogy a Kikwit. The school is located in Kikwit on the mighty Kwilu river. When I wasn't doing physics I spent a lot of time swimming, boating, and fishing. Being near the water was convenient since it gets very hot on the equator. During the summer between the two years that I was in Zaire I led a team that built a bridge. My roomate from Peace Corps, John Schelp, lives nearby in Durham. We stayed healthy by eating the local food. I try to stay involved with the Peace Corps through the North Carolina Peace Corps Association and by helping out with recruiting on campus, here at Wake.

A couple of months after finishing my work as a Peace Corps Volunteer I entered a MS program in physics at Southern Illinois University. I did my thesis work under Walter Henneberger. It involved using Feynman Path Integrals to calculate the Aharonov-Bohm Effect.

After completing a Masters degree I joined the Graduate Group in Biophysics at UC Berkeley to obtain a Ph.D. My thesis advisor was John E. Hearst. Most of my graduate work was conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition to John Hearst, I am grateful to the training I received from Arlon J. Hunt and Marcos F. Maestre. My dissertation was on using polarized light scattering to examine chromosome structure.

After completing a Ph.D. in 1993, I started postdoctoral work in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz. I worked in the laboratory of David S. Kliger. David Kliger's lab was (and still is) loaded with very talented people such as Diping Che, Ray Esquerra, Bob Goldbeck, and Jim Lewis. Diping, Ray and I developed nanosecond time-resolved linear dichroism and circular birefringence techniques based on Jim Lewis' original circular dichroism technique. I was supported at Santa Cruz by a NIH postdoctoral fellowship (NRSA) the focus of which was using time resolved linear dichroism to study the ligand binding kinetics of sickle cell hemoglobin polymers. My other postdoctoral advisor, to whom I forever indebted was Mohan Narla from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.