The road less traveled passes through some strange country, beautiful and inexplicable. My road has wound through high school records, college failures, start-up manias, experiments in isolation, snails (so many snails), college resurrections, tips-of-the-tongue, CIA sponsored nobilities, Ph.D. meanderings, motherhood(s?), and one rather astonishing bend in the road. Today, I'm a researcher at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley, where we think deep thoughts about deep thinking. Here's my personal philosophy on the subject:

Neural/cognitive systems employ representational codes derived from the multidimensional statistics of both exogenous and endogenous signals. Not surprisingly, our intuitions about the forms of these representations typically fail to capture their actual complexity. By working with information theoretic models of auditory computation I seek to analyze the role of more complex codes in human information processing.

Away from the lab... well there really isn't an "away" from science; it can be hard to escape. It leaves an imprint on the brain. As a result, romance tends to come with other people who use words like orthogonal in regular conversation. Fortunately, I found one who is both brilliant and beautiful (just like her wife). We live in a lovely little spot in North Berkeley, just a short hike away, the Berkeley Rose Garden offers fairytale views of Golden Gate sunsets.

Steinbeck wrote a book called "The Pastures of Heaven". I grew up there. It's pretty a nice place. My mom and dad still live in the area. I did a lot of bragging about them and still do. Over in San Francisco, my older sister merges serious and wild while tending to the nursing needs of the land. Our younger brother is probably a CIA agent. My two best friends remain such after more than 30 years, including 4 very indulgent years of private school. If you have a growning suspision that I consumed a rather heaping helping of "great childhood", I would very much agree with you.