I was born and raised in Chicago and Evanston and still have strong ties to the Windy City, even though I haven’t lived there since 1985.
I was trained as an organic chemist (B.S., Purdue University, 1979; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1985) and I was hired by The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI as a Sr. Research Chemist right out of graduate school. After a few years, it became clear to me that I liked writing more than I liked running experiments in the lab, and Dow graciously gave me the opportunity to change careers and begin the practice of patent law. I received my J.D. from Wayne State University Law School in Detroit in 2002, one week after my elder daughter Shiri graduated from the University of Michigan, and three weeks after we adopted 9-month-old Nina from Cambodia.
I left Dow in 2004 to join Glaxo Smith Kline in the greater Philadelphia area. This upset Dow so much that in 2009 they acquired Rohm and Haas – whose corporate headquarters in Philadelphia was a 10-minute bike ride from my home – just so they could induce me to come back to the fold. (That is my story and I’m sticking to it!) It worked, and I stayed with Dow for another 15 ½ years until I retired at the end of 2025.
I became an adjunct professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law in the spring of 2023, and repeated the course in patent prosecution in the spring of 2025.
I was an avid duplicate bridge player while in graduate school and, after years of dormancy, I’m playing again on-line in a club game in London, of all places. They really love my accent.