For those who like to know
I was born in 1964, in California, and I’m a U.S. citizen. My immediate family is pretty old; my parents were born in 1926 and 1931, and my stepdad was born in 1918. I have a lot of siblings, step-siblings, and sort-of siblings, most of whom are old enough to be the parents of my friends.
I am a professional academic, specifically evolutionary biology, with a Master’s and Ph.D. in Zoology. I did my undergrad at the University of Chicago and my grad work at the University of Floriday, and now, I’m a professor in the Chicago area, at DePaul University. I’ve always considered science to be a subset of the liberal arts and that influences my research and teaching.
I’m married and have three kids: boy-girl twins born Setember 2007 and a boy born in March 2009. My wife is native Swedish and we travel to northern Europe pretty often, to Sweden of course and as often as I can to my favorite city, Berlin.
I never found any sort of organized sports I like very much. I spent a lot of my early life camping and backpacking in pretty rugged circumstances, and I’ve hitch-hiked and backpacked over quite a bit of the U.S. Both academics and settling in the midwest kind of stopped that, though. Before I developed some troubles with breathing a few years ago, I was very active in martial arts and was in a lot better shape.
I played the trumpet for a long time as a kid, in all sorts of types of music, and for a while as well I was pretty into theater, including co-founding a kind of guerrilla theater group in college.
I’m politically active and come from a schizophrenic, various political family background so it’s hard to characterize myself in terms of parties or groups. I guess you could call me an anti-Cold Warrior. My main efforts at the moment concern Palestine and Israel, mainly campus events.