I left Beloit in April 1969 for my first real job as a geologist in Colorado exploring for minerals in the Rockies. After a very brief stint in the US Navy, I attended Penn State University from 1971-1976 for my Masters in Geology and a PhD in Geochemistry, working on gold deposits in volcanic rocks. After a year-long post-doctoral position with the USGS, and a one year stint teaching at the Escuela Politecnica in Quito, Ecuador, I was hired by the USGS at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in 1978 where I honestly thought I'd spend the rest of my life. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens changed all that and I moved to Vancouver, Washington to be part of the USGS group monitoring the volcano.

In 1984 I started a project in Indonesia and from 1985-1988 I was stationed in Bandung, West Java as an advisory volcanologist to the Indonesian government. 1989-1990 found me back in the States and working mainly in Alaska on the Redoubt volcano eruption which had such a visible impact on commercial aviation due to volcanic ash. For the next decade most of my USGS work focused on work to mitigate the effects of volcanic ash on aviation operations and led to numerous foreign assignments including time in Zaire/Rwanda to assess volcanic hazards (lava flows, gas emissions, ash fall) affecting the refugee camps during the 1994 genocide. In 1996 I started the phase of my career in USGS administration and did various jobs in the Director's Office. I "retired" from the USGS 11 years ago today (June 6, 2019) and began another career phase as a USGS scientist emeritus volunteer working on a variety of projects including volcanic hazards and geological heritage.

For the past decade I've done pro-bono work for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which evaluates candidates for World Heritage designation. Again my "job" includes a lot of international travel and work in some pretty cool places. While it's probably not completely fair to say "it all began at Beloit", in many ways this is in fact how it began. My anthropology and geology majors pretty much set me up and gave me the the tools to feel comfortable working in a variety of cultures on a variety of geological hazard situation. But it's not been just the formal Beloit education, but the friends and faculty members who were my colleagues and mentors. The late '60s was a very nourishing and enriching time to experience Beloit. I'm forever grateful and consider myself to have been very lucky. "Chance favors the prepared mind ..." as the saying goes. Beloit happened to be a place where they prepared our minds a little bit better and differently... I'm thankful.

I started by college journey at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois in September 1965. In September 1966 I transferred to Beloit College to study Anthropology. In the Fall of '67 I took Hank Woodard's Introductory Geology course and then followed a two-major track. It was a fortunate choice to be a double-major and started me down a career path where I was lucky to work on volcanoes around the world and in many different cultures.