I grew up in Cranford, New Jersey, a bedroom suburb of New York City. I graduated with a BA in physics in 1966 from colonial Rutgers College, in the antediluvian days when it was an all-male college. Energized by John Kennedy's exhortation to ask what one can do for America, I joined the Peace Corps, serving between 1966 and 1968 as a secondary school teacher in Lomé, Togo, West Africa, where I taught math, sciences, art and music in French and learned a bit about the world at large. In 1968 I resumed study of physics at Rutgers University, receiving a PhD in 1976. My dissertation research, under direction of Noémie Koller, was on the quadrupole interaction in tin metal studied using Mössbauer spectroscopy. In 1977 I took a postoctoral position at Clark University with Chris Hohenemser, from whom I learned perturbed angular correlation spectroscopy (PAC) while investigating hyperfine-field shifts in magnetic alloys. I stayed on at Clark from 1979-85 as research assistant professor, collaborating with Chris on hyperfine interactions studies of magnetic critical phenomena and point defects in metals. In 1985, I took a position as Associate Professor of Physics at Washington State University in Pullman, where I am now Professor. With long-standing support from the National Science Foundation and newfound, generous support from a former student, Praveen Sinha, my students and I are currently applying PAC to study lattice locations and diffusion of solute atoms in intermetallic compounds.
Peggy Webb and I were married in 1978 and have two wonderful children, Daniel and Emily. I enjoy games, travel, and a study of history through a detailed examination of my ancestry. For family pics and news, and information about Pullman and environs, go to my personal page.