I
originally come from Cardston,
which is a small town (about 3500 hearty souls) in Western Canada. It
is found in Southern
Alberta and is just north of the border with the United States.
The picture to the left is of that great prairie sky. I received my
Undergraduate Degree, B.Sc. (First Class Honours Chemistry) from the
University of Alberta in
Edmonton in 1980. I took
off two years in the middle of my undergraduate degree to go to
Europe and serve as a missionary for the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was in the Switzerland
Geneva Mission which included the Southeast corner of France and
the French speaking cantons of Switzerland.
Down on the right is a picture of the famous Pont d'Avignon, a bridge
over the Rhône river at Avignon in Southern France. The bridge
only goes halfway across the river, so it is only good for dancing
on; hence the famous children's song.
I returned to Edmonton in 1978 to finish my undergraduate degree.
I went from there to the University
of Toronto in 1980 (below is a picture of Toronto taken at night
from the top of the CN Tower. You can see the Gardiner Expressway run
off toward Mississauga and Oakville.) where I received my Ph.D. under
the guidance of Prof.
John Polanyi in the field of Gas Phase Reaction Dynamics (I was
studying the reactions F + Na2 
NaF + Na* and F2 + Na2
NaF + F + Na*). 
John
received the Nobel Prize
for Chemistry in 1986, the year I graduated. In fact I was the first
student to graduate following his Nobel Prize. He returned from
Sweden and I defended my thesis in about the same week. However, I
had poor timing for the original announcement. My family and I were
in the process of moving to Seattle
to the University of
Washington and we were staying in a motel in Northern Wyoming
when the news first broke. The celebrations went ahead without
me!
At
the University of
Washington, I worked with Prof.
Tom Engel, who introduced me to the field of Surface Science. I
was there for almost three years, working part of the time with a He
diffractometer, studying the roughening phase transition on Ni(117)
and part of the time working on the development of a scanning
tunneling microscope. We were finally able to achieve atomic
resolution on both Si(111) and Ag(115) before I left to go to Guelph.
The picture on the right is of Puget Sound in Seattle. The family is
playing on the rocks in the foreground and if you look very carefully
just above the point of land in the background you can just make out
Mount Rainier, one of the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest's
Cascade Mountain Range.
I came to Guelph in 1989 as an Assistant Professor and have been here ever since.
Laura
and I have been married for 18 years and have four children, Shara
(17), Scott (15), Robert (12), and Caitlin (9) and a big, black cat
named Ziggy. We like to go camping together and regularly visit the
Pinery
for a week every summer. Here on the right is a picture of me flying
a kite on the shore of Lake Huron while having been buried in the
sand - a remarkable talent. To the left is a picture of the family
taken at the mouth of the Lewis
and Clark Cavern. These caves are found in southern Montana,
a couple of hours from Yellowstone
National Park.
Site
design and maintenance by Royal Web
Weaver. ©1998