I was born in 1952 in the small market town of Royston, England, close to Cambridge, where my father was a research fellow. He was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Congregational minister and a schoolteacher. My mother also came from a family of schoolteachers and taught English. I have an older sister and a younger brother, and in later years my parents adopted my much younger sister, now sadly deceased.
When I was seven, we moved North to the spa town of Buxton in the Peak District, for my father to take up a position as head of the Engineering department at Manchester University. I went to school in Manchester and obtained a place at Cambridge University in 1969. However, being rather young, I spent a year between school and college doing what is now known as a “gap year”, working at various factories in and around Birmingham in the English Midlands.
Once at Cambridge I studied Natural Sciences as an undergraduate, learned to row, then spent two years at a scientific instrument company before returning to postgraduate studies in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, featured in the recent Oppenheimer movie. I was the exact opposite of the eponymous hero, being good at experimental work but a bit shaky on theory.
In 1978 I moved with my first wife and our three children to Chicago, to take up a postdoctoral research position at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The original plan was to return to England after a couple of years, but instead I made two quick job changes and wound up at a technology incubator in Berkeley, CA. Through most of the 1980’s I ran my own company in Berkeley, building control systems and software for machine tools.
Over the ensuing years I transitioned into factory information systems, then information systems in general, working across aerospace, technology and life sciences industries as a project manager for two consultancies and two startup software businesses. I finished my career as a Firm Director at Deloitte Consulting, the consulting arm of Deloitte and Touche. One of my side jobs was to lead our recruiting efforts at Cal Poly.
I met my wife Kathy when we were both working at a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin in Mountain View, CA. We were married in 1996 and spent 22 years living close to the beach in Aptos on the Monterey Bay, where our two children were born. I retired in 2011 to home-school our son through High School, and we moved down to San Luis Obispo County in 2017. We still miss the soft coastal weather, especially in the summer months, but we love our home on the West side of Atascadero, surrounded by trees and a great variety of fauna.