My next chapter is yet to be written, but I have my sights set on exploration and adventure on a personal scale. I am writing this blog largely to document my first bike tour from Vancouver, BC to San Francisco and have plans for more tours, Sierra backpack trips and the occasional international travel.
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia in the mid-century modern house that my father designed. The “modern” house (“mid-century” being a term coined only recently), with its classic 50’s decor and food-themed mural hand painted by my dad on the large kitchen walls, was featured with a photo-spread in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Growing up across the street from the University of Richmond, we played on its beautiful grounds and athletic fields and we sledded its hills and skated on its frozen lake in winter. Summers were otherwise spent at the local community pool and tennis courts – Ridgetop.
After college in Charlottesville, VA, and marriage to my sweetie, who grew up literally up the street only blocks away, we did short stints in Boulder, CO and Corvallis, OR, before settling in California in 1980 and in our current Menlo Park home in 1982.
After 35 years at NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, I retired in 2015. I was fortunate to work with many incredible people from around the country and around the world on many exciting international scientific projects in far-flung locations around the planet, largely using NASA’s fleet of unique aircraft fitted with state-of-the-art scientific instruments. One significant highlight was returning the “smoking gun” – the scientific evidence from flights over Antarctica by the NASA-modified U-2 aircraft which proved conclusively that human produced CFC’s were responsible for the “Ozone Hole”. Not too often that your normally arcane scientific accomplishments have a major impact on international environmental policy. In my last 10 years at NASA I joined the SES ranks (senior executive service) as the Chief of the Earth Science Division – about 120 scientists, engineers and support personnel whose life work is dedicated to understanding and protecting our home planet. We use the unique NASA perspective of space-based observation, augmented with aircraft and surface data, and state-of-the-art global Earth system (climate) models run on NASA’s supercomputer at Ames, to better understand the Earth’s geophysical systems and our human impact on them.
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