Honors and Awards | Mentoring Workshops | Collaborators

I was born in Southern California and attended public schools while being exposed to the wonders of the Pacific Coastline and the Sierra Nevada mountains. College at U.C. Berkeley (roughly 20,000 undergraduates) and was a big change from my 400 person high school.  During my attendance there, the UC Regents increased the tuition from $1,200 a year to a whopping $4,200. Outrageous! Little did we know where this train was going.

Undergraduate education introduced me to the importance of self-directed learning and the amazing, unrelenting progress the scientific method can make. An undergraduate experience with Dr. Jasper Rine in Genetics taught me how to design an experiment.  While executing an experiment turned out to be more difficult, this was a pivotal experience for me.

I spent a year at UCSF learning to love reverse transcriptase with Jay Levy, the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, working as a lab technician and applying to medical school and loving San Francisco as a 20 something.

I then moved back to Southern California to attend UCLA Medical school, which was renamed while I was there in the beginning of the trend of donor-named institutions of higher education. This trend has also continued. I was exposed to clinical research at UCLA early but took a year off to join the lab of Harold Varmus at the NIH to learn about mouse models of cancer when the ability to manipulate the mouse genome was exploding contemporaneous with the publication of the first drafts of Human Genome and the turn of the century.

After much consideration of what residency to pursue (surgery, pathology, internal medicine, dermatology were all such fun rotations!) I went to Stanford for two years of Internal Medicine and then back to UCSF for Clinical Fellowship in Medical Oncology.

I hung out at UCSF in the Department of Medicine for almost 20 years, learning genomics from Joe Gray, and how to take care of patients from Margaret Tempero, Alan Venook, Andrew Ko and many others. Somehow, I had some grants funded, wrote some papers and eventually was promoted to Professor in the depth of the 2020 pandemic. My co-faculty at UCSF and the excellent trainees attracted to the San Francisco ecosystem were the special sauce that made this possible.  

In 2024, I moved my lab and family to Washington to join Fred Hutch where a new adventure is starting.