David Montefiori:  

After graduating from Strong Vincent, I attended Gannon College for 1 year as a mechanical engineering major and soon discovered that I was more interested in biological sciences. I transferred to Edinboro State College (now Edinboro University of Pennsylvania) the following year as a biology major, with the intention of teaching high school biology. After about 1 year at Edinboro I got interested in basic research and found myself doing microbial genetics research in the laboratory of my microbiology professor, Dr. Ellis Kline. I have been doing research ever since. It was at Edinboro that I met my first wife, in calculus class of all places. We later married and had two daughters, Lindsey (age 31, Ph.D. in molecular genetics from University of Chicago, now a postdoctoral fellow at St. Jude's) and Shannon (age 29, BS in English from Rhodes College, not sure what comes next). After graduating from Edinboro, I went to Clemson University and obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology. Clemson was wonderful, especially its rural setting, but my heart remains more fond of Edinboro. From Clemson I moved to Nashville, TN as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt. I loved living in the south and decided that is where I wanted to s...Expand for more