I provide details of my professional life in the links above.  However, some more personal expressions of who I am and what I have done is always beneficial.

I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia.  I grew up in the bay beach suburbs of Melbourne, where I spent my summer after school daylight hours swimming at the bay beaches.  To me, swimming and sailing were more than sports or recreations, they were a part of life, just like walking, running, and climbing stairs.

Like most Australian children, in addition to water sports I grew up playing cricket in the summer and Australian Rules football in the winter.  My love for sport and exercise led me in the direction of becoming a physical education teacher.  This was reinforced through my high school experiences in physical education, and my exposure to physical educators during my life as a professional and semi-professional football player between the ages of 15-21.

After graduating from a teachers college with a degree in physical education, where I emphasized in exercise physiology (double major), recreation and geography, I knew that I wanted to pursue graduate education and training.  However, I first desired to make some money, develop a professional identity, and experience living on my own.

I worked in a county technical school (Irymple Technical School, Mildura, Victoria) for 3 years, where I taught physical education and geography.  Three years of teaching was enough to realize that it was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my career, that my inner desires to pursue further education were still as strong as ever, and that I needed to feed my fundamental inquisitiveness in human physiology.  During 1984 I applied to many different Masters Programs in exercise physiology within Australia and also in the USA.  By October 1984 I had been informed that I was accepted into what was then the best Masters Program in exercise physiology within Australia at the Department of Human Movement Studies at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth.  In December 1984 I resigned as a teacher and in February 1985 I traveled across Australia (by train) to Perth to commence study at UWA.

I studied at UWA from February to June, 1985 under the superb direction of Alan Morton.  Due to my desire to eventually study in the USA, become a research-based exercise physiologist, and aspire to be as good as I could be in exercise physiology, I wanted to improve my basic science background.  In addition to studying the basic core classes of the Masters program, I also studied pure physiology, and organic chemistry.  I literally worked my rear end off in Perth, and new doors to my life opened when I was informed that I had been accepted into the Masters Program at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  With advanced study from two trimesters (called terms in Australia) in advanced statistics, exercise physiology, pure physiology, chemistry, and involvement in graduate research projects, I was very confident that I would do well in my studies in the USA.

I returned to Melbourne in July 1985 in preparation for my trip to North Carolina.  I arrived in North Carolina late September, 1985, and was in culture shock.  Imagine an Australian, with what was then a thick accent, in south-east USA.  I was hardly understood, and I could not understand the North Carolinian African American accent either!  

Anyway, I handled the program at Wake Forest quite well - in fact it seems I did too well for the likes of some of my peers and faculty.  Nevertheless, I made great friends in Paul Ribisl and Don Bergey, and with outstanding training in the broad array of exercise/sports sciences at Wake Forest, as well as the Cardiac Rehabilitation Program, I was ready to pursue a Ph.D.  Paul's friendship with David Costill made Doc's program at Ball State my obvious focus.  I interviewed with Doc, and after seeing what I had only read in books and research journals, I was infatuated with Doc's knowledge and facilities.  In fact, I was so hooked on study at Ball State that I made three trips to Muncie, Indiana prior to finishing at Wake Forest simply to grow from the energy that exuded from Doc's lab.  These trips were quite an experience - driving through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and then into Indiana in a yellow VW I purchased for $1,500 from one of Paul Ribisl's friends.

Completing a Ph.D with David Costill was the icing on my educational experience.  Doc equipped me with more than knowledge and research skills.  I was aware of the professional duties of an exercise physiologist, I developed my open-door positive approach to mentoring students, and realized that a well-trained exercise physiologist, given the right equipment, could research almost anything exercise-related that he/she wanted to because there was a world of questions that still had to be answered about how exercise influences the human body.  Doc not only taught me that research was important, but it was also fun and can be enjoyed throughout a full career.