Hello and welcome to my website!

These pages are mainly an experiment in web page design, but I do hope to add some useful and interesting material as ideas strike me.

Please have a look around and enjoy!

2 August 2007:

Summer field work has brought me to the Florida keys where we are doing nightly dives in the hopes of collecting Elkhorn coral spawn (being a PhD student is rough, but somebody has to do it). I have set up a blog chronicling our progress. You can find that here. I also has the chance to take off for a couple hours today to check out a local state park where a quarry was dug through a fossilized reef. You can see entire coral heads from ancient star coral (montastrea annularis) and brain corals (Diplora spp.). Pictures from that are posted here.

14 April 2007:

So it's been a while since I updated this, but I just got around to figuring out the personal web page system here at Penn State. So far so good with the grad school thing. I won't try to summarize here, but pics from trips to Hawaii and Florida will be up soon.

Here is my entry to the Inkling - inteligent design contest. Its based on the Philistine god Dagon. An interesting character...you can learn all sorts of weird stuff about him here & of course here.

11 Septemer 2006:

This weekend was the big Ride! It was an awesome experience and an incredible day! The weather was nice, with a little rain to cool us off about halfway through the route.

All together there were well over 300 riders and we generated over $190,000 for AIDS patients in central NY!

I'm proud to say I completed the 100 mile route in 6 hours and 40 minutes and was able to pass my fundraising goal of $500.

I'd like to send my thanks to everyone to supported me through my training, with donations, and on the day of the ride! Your encouragement really helped motivate me through this !

THANK YOU !!!

9 September 2006:

My first week of grad school is complete! At this point I've managed to find all my classes and begun the process of setting up the new lab. Already I have a daunting amount of reading ahead of me, but the most urgent issue at this point is getting my SCUBA open water certification so I can do some field sampling this winter in Hawaii. Classes for that start next week, so wish me luck!

I am all unpacked and settled in to my new appartment in the little town of Lemont, PA. Its the perfect distance from campus, far enough away to escape the throngs of freshmen hanging out in State College, but close enough to bike to and from campus. It is a great little place, and I think Guinness and I will be very comfortable here.

I hope to get some pictures of the new place and the town up here as soon as I get them off the camera.

I have officialy registered for the STAP AIDS Ride for Life! This is a 100 mile trek around Cayuga Lake taking place on September 9, 2006 to benefit the Southern Tier Aids Program.

To participate, I need to come up with $500 before that date, and of course I haven't really done much fundraising yet.... so your help is urgently needed!

If you think you can help with a donation, or by telling others who you think might be interested in donating, that would really help a lot. Even if you only give $5...every little bit helps!

Click here for the donation form,

or

click the icon to donate online.

Thanks for your help!

22 March 2006:

Well, after years of delay, I am finally going back to school. Come fall, I will officially be a grad student in the Ecology program at Penn State! Now all I have to do is find a new apartment. I'm really excited to get started down there, but there are still many things I have to do here in Ithaca before I move.

This summer I will be wrapping up some research at Cornell and hopefully writing up a paper on what we have accomplished! As it stands right now, it looks like I will head down to PA just before the semester starts in late August. The lure of field work in some tropical reef was strong, but, I'm really into the project that we're working on in the lab right now, so hopefully I can see that through before I have to move on.