My name is Ray, I’m a nomad that has lived in Vermont, Maine, New York (Albany-area), Virginia, Los Angeles, Philadelphia (favorite city), and now Cleveland. I got into science as a kid as I would routinely terrorize my family with hypotheses that I’d test, like how big of an object can be flushed in the toilet? 1 soap bar (yup), plastic action figures (yup), 3 soap bars (nope). Unfortunately, I was too young to understand the destruction of pipes this would cause.
I went to undergrad at smaller liberal arts school called Christopher Newport University and majored in Chemistry. I then moved across the country to UCLA for grad school which would have been a lot more fun if I wasn’t a poor grad student and working all the time. At UCLA I studied chemistry that would improve fluorination and biomolecule tagging as I was in a group interested in PET imaging. There I was able to make some radioactive probes and did some animal imaging. After UCLA I did a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and continued working on making imaging probes. After 2 years as a postdoc I moved to Cleveland and worked at Lubrizol on projects relating to: antioxidant design, corrosion inhibitors, friction modifiers, immersion fluids, CO2 storage, and engine modeling.