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.

My current research interests include 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 where the energy is too low for quantum field theory to be practical.

I am also interested in Ecological Population Modeling. In particular, I'm interested in the question of whether or not a so-called Maternal Effect is important in modeling populations. One way to explain the Maternal Effect is that it is the idea that the number of births for a given population is dependent not just on the number of mothers, but on the health of the grandmothers! If such an effect turns out to be important, it would mean that populations would have a kind of "inertia", analagous to the inertia that causes a mass to keep moving when there are no forces on it. To that end, my students and I have been growing a predator-prey system consisting of the protozoans paramecium (prey) and didinium (predator). By monitoring the populations in various situations, we hope to shed some light on the importance (or not) of this Maternal Effect.

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 believe the part of quantum mechanics that calls for arbitrary collapse of the wave function on measurement. We have five children and four 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.