Personal: about my family and worship of chocolate

Most of my ancestors emigrated from Ireland during the potato famines in the mid 19th century. I was born in Syracuse, New York and spent most of my early years in upstate N.Y. and N.J. During many of the summers in those years, I lived in a place called (no kidding) Knobby Knoll, a small neighborhood near Sackets Harbor, which is itself a small town near Watertown, New York. (Around the turn of century in Watertown, my paternal grandparents owned a restaurant and chocolate shop-- so I guess the chocolate addiction is in my genes). In later years my family lived in New Jersey (mostly in Moorestown and in Park Ridge) but I was graduated from Lahser High School in Michigan.

I'm one of six children raised in a Catholic family. My parents are retired and living in Arizona. Four of my sibs are lawyers: Betsy is a lawyer in New Mexico; Tom practices law and is a financial consultant; Mark was a lawyer and teacher before his death on May 14th 2007; Steve is an attorney for the public defender's office in Maryland; and Fran, the only sibling besides myself who is not yet a lawyer, got his M.B.A., became a financial consultant and then got his M.A. in order to teach high school students. (Somewhere next to the chocolate gene there must be teaching and legal genes.)

My wife, Elizabeth, and I were married near Chapel Hill, N.C. in August 1997. Elizabeth has her B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and her M.A. and Ph.D. from IU's Department of History and Philosophy of Science. In the Spring of 1999 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. In August of 1999 Elizabeth joined the Department of History faculty at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where she now has tenure. Elizabeth was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to spend January through July 2003 in South Africa and England to do research on how British science was transformed by its experience in South Africa. Her book manuscript, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in the Industrial Age, was published with State University of New York Press in 2006.

After spending the first part of our married life living in different states and countries, we're quite happy to now be living together again--but this time in Texas! When I'm neither teaching nor being astounded at her knitting skills, I'm spending all my time with our son Liam!