I grew up along the south shore of Lake Erie with annual trips to the Atlantic coast in South Carolina and developed a life-long love of aquatic environments in general and the marine environment in particular. From a fairly early age I knew that I wanted to be a biologist working in marine ecosystems. I developed a strong interest in marine macroalgae working with my undergraduate advisor at Duke University and further developed that interest into a career focus during graduate work at UNC-Wilmington and UC-Santa Barbara. We also study the influence of climate change on these communities and on individual species within them. My postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois at Chicago took me into studies of how bacteria behaviorally respond to information about their chemical environments where I learned methods and perspectives that were very important in developing my subsequent UAB-based studies of marine chemical ecology and behavior.