I've been teaching physics at Truman State University since 1990.  Before that I taught physics, math and chemistry at Deep Springs College in California for five years, and before that I taught high school math and physics at Navajo Mission Academy in New Mexico for a year.

I was an undergraduate at Antioch College, where I also had a lot of fun playing the guitar and being in the volunteer fire department.  I got my Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Oregon in 1984, where I studied microscopic models of vibrational odd-mass nuclei with Amit Goswami. I am now interested in relativistic hamiltonian dynamics and its application to the properties of small nuclei. Relativistic hamiltonian dynamics is a relativistically consistent approach to quantum mechanics, and is useful in the medium energy realm of nuclear physics, where standard (nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics is not applicable, but full-blown quantum field theory is impractical. I have been learning about this approach to doing nuclear physics from Bill Klink and Wayne Polyzou, who are at the University of Iowa.

My wife, Sue Abrahams, is a counselor here in Kirksville. We talk often about life, knitting (she is a knitter, and is teaching me to knit), music, counseling, teaching, and physics. She doesn't buy the part of quantum mechanics that calls for arbitrary collapse of the wave function on measurement. She doesn't understand how friction really works, but of course neither do I. We have five children and two grandchildren.

I've loved physics since I was in sixth grade when my dad gave me physics lessons as a way to help him understand The Evolution of Physics by Einstein and Infeld, which he happened to be reading at the time for fun. When I was little there were two things I wanted to be when I grew up--a hobo and a scientist; I seem to have acheived both goals--sort of. I've also always loved music, and when I was not so little I decided that if I was a professional musician it would be unlikely that I would ever do physics, but if I was a professional physicist it would be likely that I would still do music, so I decided to go to physics graduate school. I now play various kinds of folk, country, and blues around town, mostly with a band called Redwing.