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Professor of Biology and Anthropology, Polk State College. I’ve always been a plant geek and knew without a doubt that I wanted to study botany in college. I received my degrees from Miami University: a BS in Botany; an MS in Mycology and Botany under the supervision of Dr. Martha Powell; and a PhD in Ethnobiology, under Dr. W. Hardy Eshbaugh (Botany) and Dr. Adolph Greenberg (Anthropology). During my years at Miami, I spent a lot of time in the college greenhouses and herbarium, and became exposed to many plants and plant families that didn’t grow in Ohio. While in graduate school, Dr. William Carvell was revising a section of Anthurium, and there were lots of Anthuriums in the greenhouses. I became hooked on aroids. In the mid 1980s, I was an exchange student in Guangzhou, China; which began several years of living in subtropical and tropical Asia (though I did travel the grasslands and deserts as well). I worked among the H’tin, and ethnic group living in the mountains of NE Thailand, then eventually ended up studying the ethnobiology of the people of Andros Island Bahamas. Years of living in very different tropic zones continued my love of tropical plants, and I kept gravitating to aroids. Over the past few decades I have also been involved with the captive husbandry of Dendrobatids (poison dart frogs). That has split my love of aroids in two disparate directions: I will always love big showy Anthuriums and Philodendrons, and be fascinated by Amorphophallus; but now I also have a passion for the smaller aroids that will thrive in the high humidity of a glass enclosure just a few cubic feet in size. I’m also interested in aroids that are hardy in my Zone 6 Kentucky farm.