I grew up in Winnipeg Manitoba and did my BSc at University of Manitoba, in the middle of the Canadian Prairies.

From there I went on to graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I studied fascinating materials called amorphous metals. These are formed when liquid metals are cooled extremely quickly, forming a solid with an almost liquid-like disordered structure. Montreal is in the French-speaking part of Canada.

Montreal

After finishing my PhD I did a postdoctoral fellowship in Lisbon, Portugal. This was my first introduction to the relatively new area of physics research, thin magnetic films. And also to the Portuguese language!

After Portugal I moved to Vancouver, BC and began a 3-yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University. The group there was also studying thin-film magnetism but using a very different technique: laser light scattering.

Vancouver

From there, I moved to University of Toronto where I was part of a team of instructors that taught freshman physics courses to enormous classes of 1500 or more students.

Then finally, a return to the West Coast, and WWU in Bellingham, WA.