I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, which is about the same size as Sydney.  My first goal was to be a professional (ice) hockey player, then later to be a rock/heavy metal drummer, and finally to be an academic.  In pursuit of the last goal, I went to York University in Toronto and studied Psychology and Political Science as an undergraduate.  I became interested in sensory perception, that is how the brain processes inputs from our sense organs (i.e. the eyes, ears, nose, skin, etc).  Upon completion of my Honors BA, my band had not hit the big time so I enrolled in graduate school, also at York University.  I studied visual perception and my Masters and Doctoral theses were on stereoscopic depth perception.

A year into my PhD studies, I ran out of money.  On the recommendation of my supervisor, Professor Hiroshi Ono, I took a position as an intern researcher at Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan.  Nancy, my wife, and I spent two years there and I was able to collect all the data for my dissertation.  We have been back to Japan many times since then and have a number of close friends and collaborators there.  Upon returning to Canada, I wrote up my dissertation and defended it on September 11, 2001.  A truly memorable day.

After completing my PhD, I was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Post Doctoral Fellowship to work with Professor Barbara Gillam at The University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.  Initially, the fellowship was for two years but got extended to three years.  I tagged an additional six months onto that so we could stay in Sydney for the birth or our second son, Cole.  Blake, our older son, was born in 2003, also in Sydney.

When my fellowship at UNSW ended, I took up a one-year Visiting Professorial Fellowship at Tohoku Gakuin Univeristy in Sendai, Japan.  Following that position, I was hired as a lecturer in the School of Psychology at UQ.  My research is still on visual perception, primarily on binocular vision and stereoscopic depth perception.  I teach PSYC1040 Research Methodology 1, and a few lectures in PSYC3192 Vision and Attention.