Who is drsteve?  

I was an undergrad at Cowell College at U. C. Santa Cruz. I was there, on and off, for seven years, finally stealing... uh, I mean, earning a bachlors degree in marine biology with a minor in mathematics. (I definitely recommend going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium if you are in that area.) After that, I worked for eight months in the UCSC Biology Department's Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA for Dr. Harry Noller, which is where I met my wife Kristin. Then, we came to Berkeley.

For seven years I was a full-time grad student at UC Berkeley (always a better choice than the alternative). It just so happens that I grew up here (well, Oakland, actually. But I was born in Berkeley, and it never comes off, even with persistent scrubbing!) I was in the Department of Integrative Biology, in the College of Letters and Sciences, but my major professor, Dr. Wayne Getz, was (and is!) in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, in the College of Natural Resources! Go figure! (Aren't exclamation points great!?!?!?!)

Part way through my dissertation I took some time off (well, I quit, really) to go to work full-time. I decided to change fields, from ecology to UNIX system administration and user support (which is not as big a stretch as you might think, unless you know anything about my work, in which case you probably realize it's no stretch at all). I was employed by Global Networking and Computing, where I enjoyed working until, after a brutal, months-long power-struggle between myself and the global economy, I was laid off.

Getting laid off was (in some ways) actually A Good Thing, as it allowed me to finish my Ph.D. on the population dynamics of parasitoids, which I did on April, 23, 2002 (yay). (So, yes, it took me 9 1/2 years, RealTime, to finish. But only 7 years of actual school.) After doing that (and taking a couple of months off to play a lot of video games :) I got another job, as the System Admin for Dr. Jennifer Doudna (pronounced ``Dowdna''), an HHMI Investigator in the Departments of MCB and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, and a PI in the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawerence Berkeley National Lab.

I worked very enjoyably in the Doudna Lab for almost six-and-a-half years, until December of 2008, when (in a confusing set of circumstances that I won't go into here) I was laid off again. During that time I was the one of the architects (the principle architect, maybe..?) of the UC Berkeley PHABRIX (pronounced like ``fabric'', but with bricks). Fortunately, I was easily and rapidly able to get another job, as the System Administrator for Scientific Computing at JBEI, which is also part of the PBD at LBNL, which was a pretty cool gig!

But, as with all things, it eventually became time (after six years or so) for me to leave, which I did in January 2015. I am now a Freelancer At-Large; feel free to interpret that however you like.  

Last Modified: April, 2015 by