Biography

I've never been much of a traveler.  I was born and raised in the quaint suburban town (or is it a city?) of West Hartford, Connecticut, and I stayed there for my entire life, save the occasional vacation to visit family or a brief school trip abroad.  For my undergraduate, I went to a small liberal arts school called Connecticut College (also still in Connecticut), with a major in ACS-Certified Chemistry and a minor in Italian Studies.  It's a small state, so I started to get bored...Finally, I figured that I was ready to move on, as nice as my time there had been.  I made the choice to attend UCSB (after being accepted, of course), and drove all the way out here with all of the belongings I wished to bring stuffed into the trunk of a sedan.  Since moving to Santa Barbara (I highly recommend it), apart from lab, classes and teaching I'm quite involved in ballroom dancing, enjoy the occasional hike, the more-than-occasional beer, and I even make it to the beach a couple of times per year.

Research Area

My research is on the structural elucidation of novel siderophores found through genome mining, and the investigation of unique chemical processes carried out by siderophores either in their apo form or when bound to various metals.