I  was raised in a rural setting near Windsor, Ontario, where I nurtured a love of the outdoors. One career interest in my youth was to be a music producer but as Robert Frost said “ I took the other (path), just as fair”. The real ‘bug’ for geology set in with two summers in northern Ontario mapping Archean greenstone belts. After a B.Sc. at the University of Windsor (1985),  a Ph.D. at the University of Alberta (1989) and four years as a research scientist at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut (Germany) I joined the then recently formed School of Earth and Ocean Sciences in 1994.

I am attracted to the confluence of two things: examining rocks in the field and, in parallel, simulating in the lab the many varied conditions of earth processes.  I am particularly drawn to hot rocks and research problems where my discipline can overlap with that of others.  My main research theme is centered around the earth’s mantle -  its role in the generation of magmas, in orogeny and in long term geochemical cycles involving the hydrosphere or atmosphere.