I was born a poor sharecropper in the rural...wait, wrong movie...

I was born in California, just south of San Francisco. My family moved to Texas, just south of Houston, when I was 7 years old. I then moved to North Carolina to start high school. I lived in Virginia for a year or so, but we don't talk about that. I moved back to North Carolina, where went to college and graduate school. I worked in Connecticut for a couple of years, another year in North Carolina and then to Massachusetts to teach at a private high school. I've now settled in Western Massachusetts to teach at Springfield Technical Community College.

I went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill earning a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a a minor in Biology. My graduate degree is in Neuroscience, which I earned from The Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I worked as a post-doctoral researcher for a few years after earning my Ph.D., two years at UConn and one year at UNC-Chapel Hill. I have worked primarily in the fields of anatomy and development, concentrating on the brainstem auditory system.

I was married in October of 2003 to a wonderful woman. We met while I was working in Connecticut. She is from the western part of Massachusetts commonly referred to as the Pioneer Valley. She was born and raised there, went to college in Rochester, NY, and lived in San Diego for a brief time. Our first dog is named Truman, who is a mix of an Australian Cattle Dog and some kind of terrier. The baby in our family is Charlotte, a Chocolate Lab/Australian Shepherd mix.