I grew up in Lancaster, the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country, with donkeys, sheep and a forest behind our house to explore. During high school, I worked as a carpenter and started my own business sealing driveways. My senior year, I won first prize at a science fair and was a captain of the wrestling team. During my break year before college, I built houses in Haiti and traveled through rural Nepal.

At Boston University, I majored in biochemistry and molecular biology. I studied the cochlear nucleus of gerbils and the actin binding functions of certain isozymes of the aldolase protein. I volunteered to tutor and play with children at an AIDS home, escorted elderly people to hospital visits and worked as an usher at the Huntington where I picked up a love of theater. I spent summers doing science research, interning at Pfizer, going on road trips around America and sealing driveways to make money.

After graduation, I moved to New York City to do stem cell research at New York Medical College. My projects involved bone marrow stem cell senescence and apoptosis, injection of stem cells to find renal effects and angiogenesis assays using stem cells transfected with various growth factors. I assisted in the discovery of a novel binding protein for the E2A protein using the Yeast II Hybrid system. I co-authored three papers about this research and defended a poster at the American Society of Nephrology meeting. 

I finally saved enough to fulfill my dream of going to India for a year with my kid sister. We shared a little flat in the slums (technically defined by number of toilets versus posteriors) with Mandela, a French teacher from Cameroon. While my sister worked in Bollywood, I ended up as a writer on the March to Tibet: a four month protest march of Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople beginning in the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile of Dharamsala to New Delhi and then onto the border. I wrote biographies of the marchers, articles for Western publications and one obituary. Because of India's laws against foreigners participating in political protests, I was arrested twice and finally deported.

Back in NYC, I made some money bartending and wasted some time on an existential crisis. I spent the next year hitchhiking around the States. A nice pace of life with time to read in the woods and listen to stories from your rides. Hitchhiking helped me to find the weird and interesting around this country: a burned out old hippy who preached a quiet and powerful two minute sermon on the love of the Virgin Mary, an ex-Marine who creates beautiful pieces of jade jewelry and a Keourac type figure who shared his father's homemade sausage biscuit along with stories from his life on the road.