User Profile

I'm a chemist with a love of fire in all its myriad forms.

I often facetiously characterize myself as a "mad chemist." There is probably more truth in this than my employer would like to believe, but not so much as to be a cause for worry. I simply have a passion for chemistry, and organic chemistry in particular.

I got my B.S. from Harvey Mudd College, spent two years in Quality Control at Sicor Pharmaceuticals, two years in medicinal chemistry (aka drug discovery) at sanofi-aventis, and another year in medchem at The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (aka GNF). Basically, I've spent my last three years making new drugs.

Okay, technically, I didn't actually make *drugs*, per se. I actually made a bunch of interesting molecules that might *become* drugs someday, but probably won't, given the high failure rate of projects at this stage. But the other way sounds better.

I've recently left the pharmaceutical industry to return to grad school at UCSB. I came here looking for organic research, but the more I talk to people, the more I want to do materials research.

I'm married to the lovely and talented maggiedacatt. She's even cooler than chemistry, if you can believe such a thing to be possible. We met in Colorado during spring break of our freshman year in college, then re-met three years later over a cup of coffee at Paris on the Platte and made a date to see Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig and the Angry Inch together. And that pretty much sealed the deal. We were married in September 2004, in a civil ceremony at the San Francisco City Hall, and married again at a wedding for family and friends in April 2005, in a ceremony I inadvertently turned into a sociology lecture on sexuality, gender, and inequality in the institution of marriage. Muy embarassing. But it went over well, so it's all good.

After living together for several years in southern California, we packed up and moved cross-country so Amber could attend Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan and I could take a crack at getting into drug research in the pharma hotbed of New Jersey. That worked out well enough, but NJ never treated us very well, so after two years we packed up to return to SoCal. Another year of living apart (Amber in Santa Barbara, me in San Diego) sucked almost as much as New Jersey, but now we're back in one place again :D

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