I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

Successful ecologists are successful in part because they have prepared their minds to attack scientific problems using a variety of intellectual tools.

I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.