About (me)
Although I don't talk like I'm from around there (if you've met me, you'll know what I mean), I grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, which is probably best known for being the home of the University of Iowa. After graduation from high school, I headed off west to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where I received a BS in chemistry. I was fortunate enough to receive a Churchill Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge. Although I was only supposed to spend a year there to get a master's degree, I enjoyed the environment there as well as the research that I was doing with James Keeler, so I ended up staying for a bit longer to get my PhD. The research that I worked on centered on the development of new pulse sequences for solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
After finishing up my PhD thesis, I headed back to the US to spend the next two and a half years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I worked for Bob Griffin as a post-doctoral research fellow. The two areas that I worked on while I was in the Griffin group were the application of solid-state NMR spectroscopy to look at biological systems and the use of a technique known as dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) to enhance the signal in NMR experiments.
In August 2003, I started my current position in the chemistry department at Lewis & Clark College. In 2006-2007, I spent a sabbatical year at the Medical Research Council - Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and in 2010-2011 I spent a sabbatical year at the Leibniz-Institut für Molekulare Pharmakologie in Berlin, Germany. Most recently, I spent 2017-2018 on sabbatical at Oregon State University. I led the Lewis & Clark Overseas Program to Australia in Spring 2012 and since then I established our current Overseas Program to Berlin (which I led in Fall 2015 and Fall 2019).
