When I was very young, I lived in a small trailer home in tornado alley. Explains a lot, really.

I grew up in Kansas, the eldest of five children, Today we’re scattered among Australia, California, Kansas, and Missouri. My wife Martha and I, and our three sons, live in northern Idaho, in a former logging town of about 800 people.

After I graduated from Schlagle High School in Kansas City, Kansas, I attended the University of Chicago, where I earned an A.B. in Philosophy. My undergraduate thesis translated all known fragments of Herakleitus and developed a coherent interpretation of his philosophy. After than I worked for seven years as a systems programmer for a major bank (Continental International National Bank) and a minor publishing house (Science Research Associates, then a unit of IBM). While working full time and helping raise my first child, I attended graduate school at the Illinois Institute of Technology (now Illinois Tech), earning an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science. My Master’s thesis explored non-standard logic for machine learning, and my Doctoral research used high falutin’ mathematical logic to explore why some problems are harder to solve than others.

In 1990 I joined the University of Idaho as a professor of Computer Science and affiliate professor in Philosophy. I began as a theoretician, then moved into machine learning and computational biology. 15 years later, I moved into the Biological Sciences department, where I explored bioinformatics and microbiology. During my academic career I published numerous papers and gave hundreds of talks on computer science, math, biology, philosophy, history, and more. My work has been continuously funded by NIH, NSF, DOD, NSA, BMDA, OSP … and other clumps of pasta in alphabet soup. It was my honor to graduate 9 Ph.D. students and 10 M.S. students in two different graduate programs. Along the way, I won numerous local, national, and international awards in multiple fields for teaching, research, and service. I retired in 2019 as a University Distinguished Professor.

Since retirement, I am consumed with (finally) getting a congeries of novels, short stories, poems, and essays out of my head and onto paper. I also enjoy reading ancient Greek poetry, fly fishing in wild places, playing the blues on guitar and piano, drinking excellent whisk(e)y, and shooing my calico kitten, Skitterbutt, off my keyboard. That’s her at the top of this page.