I am born

I thought it might be useful, early in this Blog development project, to post a bit about myself. I was born on November 5, 1955 in the borough of the Bronx, New York City, New York. Other than a two year exile to the suburbs of New Jersey during 4th and 5th grades (the "nightmare years"), I grew up in the City, which goes some way, I believe, towards explaining my love of Berlin. Berlin, to me, from the moment I first set foot there in 1990, felt like home, albeit a home full of people speaking german. Berliners move fast, they talk fast, and they do things their own way--just like New Yorkers--the two cities and the people in them share archetypes and I've always felt completely comfortable and at home in both places.

Well, back to me. I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Mathematics and then decided to head off for a life of high adventure. I was thinking either the Merchant Marine or the French Foreign Legion but opted instead for Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio where I studied biology and geology with the intent of an exciting and dangerous career as an ornithologist (I'm being serious here). From Oberlin, I moved in 1976 to the University of Florida, Gainesville where I took a Master's degree in Zoology and where I became interested in physiology and abandoned my avian dreams. Thus, between 1979 and 1985, I worked on a Ph.D. project in physiology at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN where I studied hibernation physiology and biochemistry in water snakes. Ph.D. in hand, I traveled on to Brown University in Providence, RI as a postdoctoral fellow and I stayed in that wonderful city for 5 years. In 1990 I visited Germany for the first time as a participant in a scientific meeting at the Max-Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Goettingen. A colleague there invited me back as a guest scientist and I spent from August 1991 through December 1992 living in Nikolausberg, a village on the outskirts of Goettingen.

It was while in Goettingen that I began to study german as a student at the local Volkshochschule (in a class filled primarily with au pair Maedchen from around the world). While living in Germany, I went on the academic, tenure-track job market and finally accepted an offer from the Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. I arrived in College Station in January, 1993 and have been here ever since--the longest period in one place in my peripatetic academic life. I am now a tenured Associate Professor.

My research work over the years has been varied but has focused on issues in comparative respiratory and cardiovascular physiology, particularly the comparative physiology of cardiac hypoxia and ischemia tolerance (the ability of the hearts of some vertebrates to tolerate extreme stresses, unlike the hearts of humans). In recent years I have devoted more of my energies to teaching and to course development and I now teach physiology to first and third year veterinary students, undergraduate bioengineering majors, and graduate students. In the spring of 2004, I along with my colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Musser, began developing our Germany based study abroad course in the history of human and veterinary medicine in Europe. Last summer was the first year we took students to Duesseldorf for the 5 week program, but the details of this I leave for a subsequent post.

Jeremy