I received an AB in paleontology from UC Berkeley in 1985, then a PhD in Geology in 1993 at UT Austin, and have been teaching in academia ever since with a research focus on siliceous microfossils. I¹m in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada Reno and have been working on diatoms for the past 6 years. My interests are in using diatoms as one of several proxies to deconvolute climatic from anthropogenic signals in lake sediments, and my current projects are in the Lake Tahoe basin, USA, and in central Italy.