Education & Science
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, I graduated from Beaverton High School in 1980. Although highly academic, my family of origin had no scientific proclivities whatsoever. My biological father was a political scientist and professor at Portland State University, my mother was trained in music, and my adoptive father was a professor of urban planning before going into public service. In retrospect, it is a complete surprise that I landed in physics.
In fact, I hated science for most of my early years. I remember the first day of 8th grade science class at Whitford Junior High school, where we spent an hour writing down all our observations as we watched a candle burn. I was bored to tears by this tedious, intellectually vapid, and manifestly uncreative activity. My early career aspirations were, thus, quite far from science: architecture, law, and politics. It might also have been natural for me to pursue a career in music, as I had studied cello and clarinet – including winning a competition to perform a clarinet solo with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra – and had been the drum major for the high school band.
As a junior at Beaverton High School, I took physics at my parents’ behest, simply to get it over with. What a life changing year that was. I had a fantastic teacher in John Madison. I was captivated by the ideas of electromagnetism, special relativity, and quantum mechanics and their intertwining with elegant mathematics. I had always loved math for its logic and sophistication. In principle, I could have pursued an academic career in mathematics, but I was smitten with physics by the end of my junior year. As a sign of how physics captivated me, I recall spending afternoons in my bedroom figuring out my own way to derive the equations of special relativity that described the mysteries of time dilation and the Lorentz contraction.
After graduating from Beaverton High, I attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where I was a Beinecke Memorial Scholar. I obtained a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics in 1984, graduating summa cum laude with a perfect academic record and receiving the Archibald High Scholarship Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.
l then enrolled as a graduate student in physics at Princeton University, earning an M.A. in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1989. I carried out research under the mentoring of Sam B. Treiman (Princeton), Wick C. Haxton (U. Washington), and Barry R. Holstein (U. Massachusetts Amherst). I am grateful to have had this amazing team of Ph.D. advisors. My Ph.D. dissertation earned the 1990 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society, with the following citation:
“For his calculation of the electroweak corrections to low-energy parity-violating neutral current interactions. The calculations are of great value for our understanding of electroweak observables and the radiative corrections to them, in particular the nature of parity-violating effects in electron and neutrino scattering from nucleons and nuclei. These calculations will have an important impact on tests of the Standard Model.”
Concurrent with beginning a post-doc at MIT, I enrolled at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, receiving an M. Div. in 1993 as part of the road to being ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.