Background I was raised in suburban Chicago and graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School where I was fortunate to receive a rigorous education by today's standards.  I then graduated from Bates College, a small liberal arts college in Maine, with a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.S. in Biology. This included spending my third year at Edinburgh University learning Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. After that, I went to UC Berkeley and obtained a PhD in Chemistry in the laboratory of Prof. Sung-Hou Kim, where I learned X-ray crystallography and, after spending four years struggling with crystals of the hammerhead ribozyme, solved the structure of the ligand-binding domain of the bacterial aspartate receptor that mediates chemotaxis in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Koshland.  I then spent a year with Prof. John Birks at CIRES trying to learn something about photochemistry in the context of atmospheric chemistry, and subsequently did a postdoc with Sir Aaron Klug at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where I again focused attention on the hammerhead ribozyme, this time solving a crystal structure. I also spent a considerable amount of time collaborating with Dr. Barry Stoddard at the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, learning Laue Crystallography and doing some further work on the aspartate receptor. After a brief stint at Indiana University as an Assistant Professor, I moved to UC Santa Cruz, where I became affiliated with the RNA Center organized by Prof. Harry Noller. In 2004, I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Ben Luisi at Cambridge University while on sabbatical, where we worked on the structure and mechanism of RNase E.  My own research group, located in the RNA Center at UCSC, has several sets of interests, including those listed here. http://www.ci.chi.il.us/city/webportal/home.dohttp://www.oprfhs.org/http://www.bates.edu/http://abacus.bates.edu/acad/depts/chemistry/http://abacus.bates.edu/acad/depts/biology/http://www.ed.ac.uk/http://www.berkeley.edu/http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/http://chem.berkeley.edu/faculty/kim/index.phphttp://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/BMB/koshlandd.htmlhttp://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/awards/birks.htmlhttp://cires.colorado.edu/http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/archive/Klug82.htmlhttp://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgehttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7541315http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7541315http://www.fhcrc.org/science/labs/stoddard/lab.htmlhttp://www.fhcrc.org/http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7761851http://www.chem.indiana.edu/http://www.chem.ucsc.edu/http://rna.ucsc.edu/rnacenter/http://www.biology.ucsc.edu/faculty/noller.htmlhttp://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/uto/luisi.htmlhttp://www.cam.ac.uk/http://www.cam.ac.uk/http://www.chem.ucsc.edu/%7Ewgscott/pubs/nature04084.pdfhttp://sage.ucsc.edu/scottlab/index.htmlhttp://rna.ucsc.edu/rnacenter/http://www.chem.ucsc.edu/%7Ewgscott/infobio.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3shapeimage_1_link_4shapeimage_1_link_5shapeimage_1_link_6shapeimage_1_link_7shapeimage_1_link_8shapeimage_1_link_9shapeimage_1_link_10shapeimage_1_link_11shapeimage_1_link_12shapeimage_1_link_13shapeimage_1_link_14shapeimage_1_link_15shapeimage_1_link_16shapeimage_1_link_17shapeimage_1_link_18shapeimage_1_link_19shapeimage_1_link_20shapeimage_1_link_21shapeimage_1_link_22shapeimage_1_link_23shapeimage_1_link_24shapeimage_1_link_25shapeimage_1_link_26shapeimage_1_link_27shapeimage_1_link_28shapeimage_1_link_29shapeimage_1_link_30