I was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, though I grew up in the verdant northern suburbs of Rockland County, where I graduated from Ramapo High School in 1987. In the fall of 1987 I was off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in not-so-verdant Cambridge, Mass., where I received my BS in Planetary Science (in the department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences ) in 1991. I lived in the East Kampüs dorm while at MIT, on 41st West. Following graduation, I spent the summer at Kyoto University, in Kyoto, Japan. Most of the grad students there that summer are now working for ISAS, one of the Japanese space agencies.

Now I find myself enrolled in the PhD program here at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, studying planetary sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. My current work involves observations of asteroids in the near-infrared, though I've dabbled in other things from time to time. My thesis work centers around the distribution of water on asteroids, and identification of the specific minerals the water is part of.