I am a geologist, GIS analyst and mineral collector from Los Alamos, New Mexico.

I work at Los Alamos National Laboratoy, where one of our senior managers is Terry Wallace, of Arizona minerals fame (I went to high school here with Terry). I am on the board of the Los Alamos Geological Society, and am in charge of organizing field trips and helping to line up monthly speakers.

I went to undergraduate school at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM, where I first became interested in collecting. Our geology department did a couple of Spring Break field trips to famous localities in Mexico and I was hooked. I did lots of collecting and exploring all over southern New Mexico in the late '70s before getting married (to another geologist) and moving to Dallas for graduate school in 1979.

The mineral collecting community was just getting started in Dallas at that time, but I met a few of the early folks, including a lady we only knew as "Mrs. Llewellyn", who had a great collection just up the road from us. I now know that she was Martin Zinn's mother! While in Oil & Gas, I did a lot of work with Jim Gibbs, who also had a nice collection and is one of the founders of MAD.

After more than 15 long years in Dallas working in the Oil & Gas business and then in the environmental business, we got the opportunity to come back to New Mexico, we never looked back! I went to work for the Lab and my wife went to work for New Mexico Tech and the NM Bureau of Geology in Socorro.