Introductions? I'm a scientist and parent, a writer and spouse, living in New York City. I spent my first twenty years in the San Francisco bay area, only to transplant myself and grow in Boston for the next ten. My family and I plan to make it back to New England someday, to an unknown farmhouse with too many trees and old sunshined floorboards and things to fix.
For now, we live in Brooklyn, with love for the place slowly creeping up on us. Life here shocks you with the art everywhere and the crush of people displacing trees and dirt and air, great sense of community with moments of breathtaking rudeness, convenience and noise and excitement. We are anchored in an amazing little turn-of-the-century townhouse with a backyard sky so big you can take in hundred year old trees and the city's past all at the same time. When ship horns roll up the slope on foggy days, you feel yourself suspended somewhere uncertain and magic.
Much of my days are spent thinking about cancer mechanisms and therapy. I am a senior scientist in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the city's big academic cancer center and hospital. I feel lucky to do the work I do. Biology was one of my first passions and wonders, fueled by an addiction to the crazy amazing details of biological life.
As for particulars, I am a member of Charles Sawyers' group at MSKCC. I work on genetic and genomic alterations in cancer and the role these alterations play in transcriptional regulation and signaling. I was previously a post-doc in Todd Golub's lab at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute. I focused on signaling in cancer biology from a genomic angle there. I got my Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School, working on the basic mechanisms of gene expression in Pam Silver's lab. My cv provides the minutiae for the bored or erudite.
The heart of my family is my lovely spouse, Kim, and young kid, Tristan. Kim and I fully intend to look back on our lives as the romance of the century. Just wait, we have our rocking chairs all picked out. As for Tristan, who knows how he will look back on us? All I know is that being a parent really is transformative. It staggers me that something so very common can be so extraordinary.
In my meager free time, I generally have a book in my hands. I try to catch modern dance, museums, clouds from park blankets, and comfortable places to stay in the middle of remoteness. I hold onto my sanity almost exclusively through matrimony and large quantities of chocolate. I like to travel, light and cheap. I am jonesing for travel while my kid is too little to backpack through much of the inhabitable world, but just wait until he is big enough to carry gear for me. My life is also political and politicized. There's no getting around that, and I wouldn't want to anyway.
Drop me a line if you want to get in touch.
