Personal

For the science stuff, see my research page/CV. This is an abridged bio and a few snippets from my personal life.

I was born when my family lived at the Grand Canyon, and am named after John Wesley Powell, first to map and raft the Colorado. My wife and I love hiking this terrain, and have logged hundreds of miles on the trails. The picture to the right is from our first anniversary, when we did a rim-to-rim hike with several days spent exploring side trails.

Out of high school I attended Berklee College of Music and left to perform and run a small recording studio. I studied Jazz composition and played guitar, bass (incl. upright), piano, drums, etc, in a variety of styles from folk to jazz and fusion, to hardcore rock, country, and electronic. The gif to the right is one of my bands playing a show. While running the studio, I took a physics course at a community college out of curiosity, and rather quickly this became my consuming passion.

I'm an animal guy, and I love my dogs (2 Alaskan Klee Kai) and my reef aquariums:

Left, one of the reefs from my undergrad. This one is mostly large colonies of soft corals. All corals grown from ~1-2" frags. Right, Sisu the Alaskan Klee Kai. This is one of the few days during development when she crawled before she learned to use her back legs. She has grown up to be exceptionally agile and intelligent, the polar opposite of our second dog, Zappa.

Really, I like just about everything, but my beautiful wife and sons are the best of all:

Harvey and Alena meet neutron scattering friends Kate Ross (Colorado State) and Martin Mourigal (Georgia Tech).