Biographical Sketch

Born in British Columbia 10 yrs prior to the first moon landing Kerry spent his impressionable years in the once thriving logging town of Terrace B.C. where he learned to canoe choppy water, climb glaciers and open a can of baked beans with a tire iron. (Terrace is now a thriving administrative and service center where, due to too much tree cutting, most people are employed washing each other's cars and renting each other videos instead of "cutting down trees, wearing high heels, suspenders and a bra...". After 4 largely misspent years as an undergraduate at UBC (Hons. Zoology) hugging trees and going out with granola eating girls of dubious hygeine and questionable taste in men (they didn't run from him so their taste must be questionable) he gave up ecology which had been hyped as "The Experimental Science" (if your remember your C. Krebs ecology textbook). Sadly all he got to do was count beetles, measure trees in sleet storms and derive endless statistically significant, but biologically irrelevant, correlations from mountains of data. So, he went looking for a research field where the fact that he was arithmetically challenged wouldn't totally hinder his progress.

NEUROPHYSIOLOGY seemed a good bet after a beer-besotted zoology professor assured him that if it took more than n = 6 to prove something was real with electrodes then it wasn't worth studying in the first place. (What he deftly failed to mention was that it could take 6 months to get 6 good recordings!). So, armed with nothing more than a paired sample t-test, and a healthy appreciation for the dining habits of garden slugs he set off like Dorothy to the land of E. Pluribus Handgun and grad school at Princeton NJ (the brochure said "located in a semi-rural setting in the Garden State...). Graduate work on the cellular basis of learned behaviour in slimies was followed by postdoctoral stints at U.C. Berkeley to study synaptic transmission at squid giant synapse, and crayfish neuromuscular junction followed by, New York University and then AT&T Bell Laboratories. It was at Bell where he got a hankering for expensive imaging toys and developed an addiction to Linos Photonics microbench components. Linos was previously known as Spindler-Hoyer and affectionately called "Schwindler und Toyer" by those with profiency in German. These components cost as much as cocaine but happily are significantly less damaging to the CNS and can be purchased without hanging around seedy street corners.

While a Grass Neuroscience Fellow at MBL, Wood's Hole he met a woman with much better hygiene than most of the previous ones. A childhood accident involving a popsicle stick and a catcher's mitt had fortuitously rendered her 'olfactorally challenged' so his own questionable hygiene wasn't a major problem, (especially bad after 5 days on the trail) so even after a marathon trip around the base of Mt Fitzroy (El Chalten) in Argentina she agreed to marry him. (The fact that he asked her while she was still in an elevation-induced, oxygen-starved, stupor probably helped enormously). She is an oceanographer who studies eating and peeing in open ocean nanoplankton, organisms that due to their lack of a brain of any description make extremely poor conversationalists. Their main party trick seems to be to sink to the bottom and slowly dissolve after they die. On the other hand her generosity towards organisms without brains may have been an advantage for Kerry with regard to that marriage thing. Fortunately she doesn't listen to him too often, (unless its regarding when to 'draw' versus set a 'high brace' while exiting or entering an eddy), so despite his footdragging they managed to add to the resource burden of the planet with Kalum (whose embarrassing baby pictures I have now, 20 years later mercifully removed from this site --saving them for his wedding ....) Annoyances include, but are not limited to, other people hiking on the same glacier and Microsoft Outlook .vif 'signature' attachments that infiltrate his inbox from philistine Windoze users who are constantly saying the Mac is dead. His motto for life is courtesy of Rodolfo Llinas: Life is painfully, unfairly, short.