I grew up a science geek. I have a strong love of all things in nature.
While out hiking in Washington State about 15 years ago, a friend said there's supposed to be crystals around here...
And then we started doing trips just to look for crystals.
In grad school, I studied the pacific yew tree and how it synthesized taxol, a cancer drug currently used in treatment of several forms of cancer.
part of the research involved driving out to areas where trees were about to be cut down for lumber and collect the yew trees for preservation and research in our laboratories.
That also led to going out with the naturalist to hike, collect fossils and more rocks and crystals. That is how I got bit by the mineral bug.
I also became a landscape and nature photographer there and had a few shows and a little success in selling my work.
Unfortunately, nature photographers in the Western US are as common as sea gulls.
I grew up in Iowa, have lived in Washington DC, Seattle Washington, and now I live in San Francisco California.
I try to attend all rock shows I can, but my main interest is still in Minerals I personally collect from the earth.
Long ago, I lived in Washington DC, and I Like how the Smithsonian Natural History museum shows the gem minerals with a natural crystal formation right next to the faceted stone of that mineral.
I decided I want my eventual display to be like that, but I wanted the pieces to be what I personally collected. That my sound a little polyanna considering I will never be able to go collect many gem minerals around the world. But I still wanted some of the faceted stones in my display to be pieces I collected personally.
Finding someone to cut my rough crystals into faceted gems without sending them overseas proved to be difficult.
So about 8 years ago I bought an Ultra Tech faceting machine, bought some books, and through Jeff Gram"s website, I taught myself to facet gemstones.
I now design my own cuts thanks to the GemCad program.

I have a Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate degrees in Chemistry. But it's in organic chemistry.
I'm the person in the laboratory mixing chemicals together to come up with new drugs for diseases.
In my education, I've had Crystal Symmetry and Point Groups in inorganic chemistry classes,
but they use different notation and vocabulary than in mineralogy. I can understand and imagine 3D well, I'm now learning the mineral crystallography terminology.
The internet with sites such as Mindat greatly help with collecting information on all the questions I have.