After I graduated from FSU, I decided to move out of Florida for graduate school, partly because I was worried that if I stayed, I would turn into the proverbial “Florida Man!”  I moved to North Carolina for graduate school shortly before the sequencing of the first human genome. I started out at UNC Chapel Hill studying histone mRNA binding proteins. After UNC Chapel Hill, I went to work for a startup biotechnology company that specialized in neurogenomics. After a stock market crash, the company went under.  After that experience, I decided to return to academic research under the supervision of Professor Erich Jarvis. While I was at UNC Chapel Hill, Erich gave a lecture on the characterization of gene expression in the zebra finch during vocal learning. After hearing about how he was able to connect to behavior to gene expression I was hooked.  I joined Erich’s lab in the early stages of his investigation of transcriptome wide changes that occurred during vocal learning in juvenile zebra finches.

As much as I loved the science I was doing, it was not as important as my role as a father to my two most favorite people, Owen and Avery. That’s why I decided to stay in North Carolina instead of moving up to NYC. However, when I did go up to Rockefeller to help set up the Vertebrate Genome Lab (VGL).

Vertebrate Genome Project (VGP)