I grew up in upstate New York in the town of Saratoga Springs. I attended Holy Cross as an undergraduate and am happy to have returned as a faculty member. After my first stint at Holy Cross, I moved on to graduate school at Northwestern followed by an NIH post doc at MIT. I have been at Holy Cross for 16 years and am now the Thomas D’Ambra Professor of Chemistry and the department chair. My research looks at the roles of metals in biology and at various metal-containing advanced materials.