During the past 50 years my interests have changed greatly from one who was only interested in surfing and athletics to a long and rewarding career in the Earth Sciences. The first major step was my acceptance to Stanford, but a football scholarship. During my second year at Stanford I came in contact with marvelous and inspirational teachers and mentors that changed my entire view of academics. They led me to see the excitement in geology and particularly gave their time to show the possibilities to work in the field to unravel the complexity of crustal history, and I have been hooked ever since.

Through one of my Stanford mentors, Dr. Hubert Schenk, I was accepted to Yale for a PhD, where working with John and one year with S. W. Carey my horizon changed to one of global tectonics, but with a firm base in field geology. The Yale experience changed my future interests from a career in the oil industry to one in academics.

My first teaching position was at Rice University, a wonderful and supportive environment for a beginning career. There was strong support for my projects from the University (very early days of NSF). With great students many projects in the Western United States were completed. But acceptance to attend the First Foreign Field Conference sponsored by the NSF to the Alps in 1962, my first trip abroad, was a major turning point in my career and opened my life-long interest in doing field work globally. In l967-68 I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in the Dinarides, but I also read extensively on the Alpine System of Eastern Europe and Turkey. This began my 40-year love affair with Eastern European and Turkish geology that continues today. At the same time I also had the opportunity to send a student to Scandinavia to work in the arctic Caledonides and that began a 25-year-long, 8-graduate-student, project making a cross section across the orogen.

In 1980, through contacts made by Peter Molnar, I had the opportunity to begin geological studies in China that have developed into a 30-year love affair with Asian geology. By 1977 I had moved to MIT where combining field geology in China into multidisciplinary studies changed and continues to change my geological thought processes.

None of this would have been possible without great teaching and mentoring, the association with outstanding graduate students and wonderful colleagues.