Highlights since high school
Trying to Explain My Job Since 1991
I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Genetics then went on to spend eleven years at Washington State earning my PhD in Biochemistry and doing a postdoctoral fellowship in Structural Bioinformatics. I also spent many hours (probably too many), riding and racing my bike throughout the Pacific Northwest.
While in Washington, I reconnected with a longtime friend, Dinorah, who was living in Hawaiʻi at the time. She joined me when I relocated to Philadelphia for my first position in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. We were engaged soon afterward and married in Yosemite Valley, where we had first met more than two decades earlier.
Our two daughters were born in Pennsylvania, but after five cold winters and five humid summers, we jumped at the opportunity to return to California. We settled in Carlsbad, where I have worked in roles spanning computational drug design, medicinal chemistry, biophysics, and structural biology. Along the way, I have co-invented several drug candidates that have advanced into clinical trials for oncology and immunology indications. One of the most rewarding moments of my career was seeing lung scans from patients whose tumors disappeared after treatment with one of those drugs.
Today, both of our daughters are in college. One attends Colorado State University, where she is studying Microbiology, and the other attends Whitworth University, where she is studying Nursing and competing as a member of the collegiate swim team.
When I’m not tied down at work, we do our best to spend time together as a family – laughing together and being silly together – despite being spread across the country. I still enjoy getting out for the occasional bike ride, and we spend as much time as we can hiking and camping along the Central Coast and in the Sierra Nevadas.
