A brief biography

I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but spent my formative years in Milwaukee. I grew up on the city's northeast side in a neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Milwaukee had been a great industrial city, and some of its former swagger remained, but the city of my youth resembled a prizefighter past its prime and on the way down, a lovable old palooka with a big heart.

I attended Saints Peter and Paul grade school and Messmer High School. I went to Marquette University in 1980. Marquette had won the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 1977, but its days as a basketball powerhouse ended when Al McGuire retired that year. I had many great teachers at Marquette, including Peter Jones, Tom Bronikowski, Michael Gillespie, and Harry Klocker, S.J. I left Marquette in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. Upon leaving Marquette, I went 90 miles west to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in mathematics. I intended to study algebra, but I found himself drawn to analysis and probability. I had many wonderful teachers and mentors at the University of Wisconsin, including Jim Kuelbs, Tom Kurtz, and Peter Ney. My dissertation, A Law of the Iterated Logarithm for Random Walk in Random Scenery, was written under the direction of Jim Kuelbs.

I left the University of Wisconsin in 1991 for Greenville, South Carolina and Furman University. Over the years, I have had the pleasure of working in the company of many dedicated colleagues and students. While my primary interest is in probability theory, my research experiences have broadened over the years, largely due to collaboration with students. My current research interests are: random walk in random scenery; iterated Brownian motion; the Gaussian correlation inequality; fractal geometry; graph theory; random graphs; and combinatorics.