Greg Lewis:  

Life After graduating from Rio Linda, I attended UC Berkeley where I got a BS degree in chemistry in 1982. Roomed with fellow Rio Linda alumnus Gene Yee the first two years and Lance Lysinger joined us there after transferring from Sac State. Berkeley was an exhilarating experience, very challenging academically, eye-opening with respect to research opportunities in the sciences and socially really wild at times... many thanks to our RL teachers Mr. Conrad and Mr. Husing for steering us there. I met my wife to be, Lori Medlen from Santa Cruz at Berkeley, but we did not get together until several years after college. After Berkeley I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I got a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry. This took forever, 9 years, on a very difficult project. I was working on molecular metal clusters containing from 15 to 50 metal atoms. We determined the atomic structure of these new materials and really addressed the question "How many metal atoms do you need in an aggregate before you have an entity that has the familiar properties of a metal?" By the time we got to 50 atoms, we were approaching, but still did not see metallic behavior. I learned a lot about obsession and failure at Wisconsin and how to persevere through the failures that one always encounters in exploratory research. Lori and I got together in 1986 in Madison, married in 1987 and our daughter Kara was born at the end of that year. Madison is a wonderful city, known as the "Mad City" and the "Berkeley of the midwest". It is the capitol of Wisconsin, liberal, beer everywhere - each little town has its own brewery, built on 4 lakes, the student union opens out onto one of the lakes and was the most popular place in Madison during the summer. Life was challenging with long hours in the lab, dirt poor on a research assistantship for a salary, having a baby, and the fact that I took so long to finish, we were lucky to survive this period. In 1991 after I graduated from UW, took...Expand for more