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Ten things you didn’t know about me.

1. I’m a first-generation college student. My parents didn’t complete college.
2. I’m a transfer student. Yep, I spent two years in Kenosha, WI playing softball for UW Parkside. I transferred to the University of California, San Diego in my junior year.
3. As an undergraduate student, I majored in psychology and minored in biology and philosophy. Life-changing classes for me as an undergraduate were Introduction to Logic (Philosophy), Philosophy of Science, Drugs and Behavior, Drugs and Society, Logic of Perception, and Neuropsychology.
4. I worked in two labs as an undergraduate student. I studied appetite using an animal model (rats) and I examined gastric emptying in J. Anthony Deutch’s lab and the effect of corticotropin-releasing factor in George Koob’s lab.
5. I’ve been at Santa Clara University since 1993. In addition to teaching several classes in psychology, I also sometimes teach a class in Public Health (Health and Aging), and I’ve taught a few classes for the Neuroscience program (Capstone and Seminar). But the biggest class I ever taught was for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at SCU. OLLI offers enrichment classes to people over the age of 50 - you should check it out and tell your parents/grandparents about it. They have over 1000 members. I offered a class on memory to over 250 OLLI students.
6. I run the Learning & Remembering lab with Drs. Whitfield and Bell. We are interested in factors that influence learning in younger people and older adults (answer: spaced repeated testing). We’ve published many papers and presented at many conferences together. And we have a lively lab with nearly a dozen undergraduate research assistants. Many of our students have also published articles and presented at conferences.
7. I started playing in a Thursday morning pick-up basketball game at SCU in 1995. Before Malley was built we played in Leavey, back when it had an inflatable roof. Steve Nash used to watch us play before his practice.
8. I’m teaching a new seminar course in the spring called Drugs, Policy and Race. It’s offered in connection to the book students read this past summer (Just Mercy). Here’s the blurb about the seminar: 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of America’s “war on drugs” and the impact this policy has had particularly on the incarceration of black and brown Americans is substantial. This seminar focuses on the impact of drug abuse and policies related to these drugs on individuals, groups, and society. I’m looking forward to this course!
9. In my free time, I love to bike, read, cook, bake, hike, and work on construction. Not in that order and not all at the same time. I got my start with Habitat for Humanity during the pandemic.
10. Something I love about my job is meeting with students. You should stop by my office and introduce yourself. If I’m not in the department you might find me in Malley, the Maker Lab or in the stands cheering for the Broncos.