I was born in Ft Lauderdale, Florida on the edge of the Everglades a long time ago.  Santa used to come to our house on an airboat!  My mother was born in southern Wisconsin (Clinton), her mother was born in Denmark and emigrated to the United States.  Her father's family came to the New World in the 1630s.  My father was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, his mother was born in Berne, Switzerland and moved to the United States in the 1890s.  His father's family came to the New World in the 1740s after the Scots were defeated at the Battle of Colloden and their uncle beheaded in the Tower of London.  

Both my mother and father were raised on farms, my dad went to college on a sheep judging scholarship and slept in the sheep barns throughout his undergraduate career at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s!  He continued with his studies and received his Ph.D. in Agronomy and Soils in 1937.  He and my mother moved to the Everglades in 1938.  

I received my Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Florida, having studied and published numerous papers on the effect of insulin in cultured neuronal and glial cells.  After graduate school I did postdoctoral training at Yale, University of Massachusetts and Sloan Kettering Institute in NYC under Joan Massague' studying Transforming Growth Factor- Beta and growth inhibition.  Subsequently, I established a lab at the University of Minnesota, where I continued my research and developed a method to identify growth inhibited cells and genes that act as dominant suppressors of cell cycle.  

Since 2017 I have taught at Dine College in beautiful Tsaile, Arizona in the Four Corners region.  I teach Anatomy and Physiology for majors and non-majors and upper division courses in Cell and Molecular Biology.  I am the advisor of the pre-professional club and am involved in collaborative research and training projects with the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.