I was born in Alabama, U.S.A. in 1973, and graduated from Brown University in 1995. After college, I lived in Brazil (Ouro Preto and Sao Paulo) for two years, and returned to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan. My Ph.D. thesis (2003) on the Mesoproterozoic tectonic evolution of the southwestern Amazon craton led to a U.S. National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship, which was spent at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I moved to Perth in December, 2006 to begin a post-doctoral appointment with Peter Cawood, and was contracted as an assistant professor in 2008.