Don't tell DFS, but I started working in the publishing field while I was a student at Cherry Hill in River Edge, NJ. Back then, compilers needed physical manuscript marked up with typesetting instructions. Underlining words with my red pen indicated one type setting. A squiggly line indicated another type setting. Instead of earning pocket money raking the lawn, I earned it marking up pages.

When I was a biology student at GWU, the internet was just becoming available to the general campus community. The first version of HTML seemed perfectly natural to me. Just like the compilers from decades past, the web browsers published a page exactly the way it was marked up. In between semesters, I got gigs editing math and science textbooks. If you want someone to read a 250 page book and tell you everything that is wrong with it, I'm your man.

After GWU, I bounced around much. My first job was teaching high school biology (AKA Living Environment) in the ACORN High School for Social Justice, a Brooklyn charter school. Not a fan of long commutes, I moved to Bushwick for the academic year. By June, I had realized that schools hamper the education process when they threaten absent students with truancy officers. I decided to teach adults instead of minors.

The next academic year, I was back to writing and back in River Edge. I served as an Environmental Commissioner for River Edge in my spare time. Back then, there was no green tax to provide dedicated funds to the environmentalist in town. We had more seats than commissioners on the Environmental Commission. Today there are so many well funded environmental groups that I have plenty of news to fill a weekly environmental column. My time on the Environmental Commission lasted until I stepped down to attend graduate school at Rutgers University.

Today, I apply my MS in Ecology and Evolution to my writing and my tinkering. I'm a professional writer and an amateur vertical farmer. I tinker with hydroponics and with production methods for producing profitable items from free-cycled materials and locally harvested natural resources. So, if you hear me mention that I'm growing grass hydroponically in my bedroom, don't worry. I'm just testing out a new growing medium with Poa alpina before using it to grow peppers or corn.