Preparation

I was raised in the small town of Ephrata, Washington, at the foot of the Grand Coulee.  I was active camping and competing in sports and was an above average (but not outstanding) student, graduating there from high school in 1961.  I attended Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, majoring in biology.  Midway, I took a year off and travelled in the south Pacific, mainly New Zealand.  Those experience influenced my becoming a botanist.

In 1966 I began my graduate studies under the mentorship of David Fairbrothers, at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Receiving my Ph.D. in 1970, I went on to work at The Ohio State University in Columbus for two years. There, I met Carol Rotsinger, and we married in the Gahanna Woods in 1972. In 1973, we travelled to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. I worked as Lecturer at the University of Malaya, and Carol worked as a printmaking instructor at the Mara Institute of Technology.  Our four years there were transformative, personally and professionally. 

After a year of travelling overland back to the U.S., we moved to Montpellier, France, where I worked with Francis Hallé for another year.  Then we moved back to the states.  After two years of landscaping and building houses, we moved to Miami, Florida where I began working at Florida International University (just 8 years old and with about 10,000 students). I worked there for 30 years, with some time off for sabbaticals and fellowships.

I retired at the end of 2009. We purchased a home in Crestone, Colorado, a small community between the Sangre de Cristo Range and the San Luis Valley, and we have lived full-time there since 2015.