I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI. My family is largely from Michigan and Arkansas. As an undergraduate I spent two years at the University of Michigan before receiving my Bachelors, with Honors, in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1982. Following graduation I spent three years working as a software engineer in the computer industry; two and a half years in CAD-related startups, and 6 months at Hewlett-Packard. In 1985 I made a career change to System and Network Administration working for Al Conrad in the Computer Sciences and Computer Engineering departments at UC Santa Cruz. At UCSC I was introduced to Unix System administration, the then tiny Internet, and the early challenges of distributed system and network security. At the encouragement of then Assistant Professor Darrell Long I started part-time at graduate school in 1987. In late 1989 I applied for, was offered, and ultimately accepted a Unix System Administration position at the École Polytechniques Fédéral Federale de Laussanne (EPFL) in Laussanne, Switzerland. Soon after I started work in Laussane Al Conrad left his CS/CE position to work for Lick Observatories, and the CS/CE departments started a recruitment for someone to replace Al. Seeing this as a good career opportunity to lead a group supporting such an interesting facility 30 miles from Silicon Valley I applied, was offered, and accepted the position. On return I worked for Prof. Pat Mantey, dramatically growing the computing facilities to meet Pat's goals for facilities to support the new School of Engineering. During this time I had continued work on graduate school, and by 1996 had begun working with JJ Garcia-Luna on routing protocol security which combined my two strongest technical interests (network routing protocols and distributed system security). Starting in 1996 this work began to progress at an accelerated rate, and JJ offered me full-time work in his research group. Since then I have worked for JJ on two research projects, and in June, 2003 completed my PhD.