I was born early one morning in 1979 in New York City, but my parents soon decided to flee the center of civilization for Brooklyn. I grew up in Brooklyn, but attended high school is Manhattan; I graduated in 1996 from Stuyvesant High School, formally located in the shadow of the Twin Towers. My time there was reasonably typical (for a nerd); I wound up playing a lot of chess. I also spent about a year working at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. I played a little violin and piano, too, about 6 years of each, but stopped both midway through high school.

I then proceeded to apply to college. MIT reminded me of the good things about New York, and I really felt at home there, so I went. I graduated in June 2000 with a degree in Nuclear Engineering, and a minor in Chemistry. Despite my degree, or perhaps because of it, I found myself in the Discovery Biology department of Enanta Pharmaceuticals, a small biotechnology company now located in Watertown, MA. I also helped out LSC, MIT's movie and lecture group, working on alumni relations. I also helped teach Athena minicourses for a couple years after I graduated. I also spent time hanging out with current and former MIT folk, especially from my old hall, 5 West. I also spent far too much time at the Galleria.

Besides doing lots of research, I applied to graduate biology programs. I was accepted into the Harvard BBS program. I started there in September 2002. I moved to an apartment (the Fiesta Terrace) in North Cambridge, near Davis Square. My final set of roommates there were 3 other graduate students; Allen, who was in my program at Harvard, Jessica, who studied museum science, and Nicole, who was in the biochemistry program at Brandeis. I had a bunny from 2002-2004, Trib. Trib has gone to live on a farm in northern MA. Prior to Jessica joining us in 2004, Diana (2002-2003) and Emily (2003-2004) also lived at the Terrace.

In August of 2005, Nicole and I moved out to a 2 bedroom apartment in Somerville, once again between Porter Square and Davis Square. A few weeks after we moved, we were joined by a third roommate, Chaucer, who as you can tell from the pictures is Nicole's adorable cat! I defended my thesis in December 2007, and in February 2008 began my postdoctoral research in the Sabatini lab at the Whitehead Institute adjacent to MIT, and a much better commute. Nicole and Chaucer moved out in the summer of 2008. After plenty of posts on craigslist, I found a new roommate, Mary, an MIT alum who works at a local biotech firm. She and her cat Millie moved in at the begining of September 2008.

Shortly thereafter, I attended the Molecular Biology of Aging conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. That's where I met Dena, who was then a postdoc in the lab of Leonard Guarente (located across the street from my lab at the Whitehead). I could tell right away that Dena was the most wonderful woman in the world, and she seemed to like me too. After a few trips to Jamaica and New Hampshire, Dena agreed to marry me. We now live in Arlington, MA, with two wonderful kittens, and our joint exploits can be found at the Team D official website.