I am the second of three sons born to Cammers. My family and I spent my first four years in my birthplace, St. Lucia, West Indies (map). Just as I was getting accustom to the folks and the climate, my family moved to Wisconsin during the dead of winter. Times got hard. There was nothing lucrative for my father to do in St. Lucia. He was the Wisconsin-born son of a cheese maker. I like to say that my father was a cheese maker, a missionary and then a cheese maker again. When times got tough my father fled the beauty and serenity of St. Lucia to the rolling green farmlands of Wisconsin, where my voice broke.

Like you all I was born crying and grew up dreaming. Star Trek, Comics (Marvel and DC), Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, a 125cc Suzuki trail bike, and acres of wood and wetland by the Pople River all served to temper the deleterious effects of juvenile androgens morphing my body from boy to man. I grew up influenced heavily by Caribbean and American working class ethics. All tolled my childhood was happy, but I am not sorry its over. It's tough being a kid.

The Baggins' always stayed at home and the Took's always went on 'adventures' in J.R.R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings", young Bilbo had the blood of both clans running through him. The Baggins versus Took controversy played out in my life as well. It was the Baggins in me who enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-EAU CLAIRE versus striking out for other states or countries. After I earned a B.S in chemistry, Baggins also found me at the University of Wisconsin-MADISON Department of Chemistry PhD program with a focus on synthetic organic chemistry, working under the supervision of Prof. Edwin Vedejs. I earned a doctoral degree and published my thesis in 1994. Tookish curiosity, however, got me interested in Chemistry in first place. Even though I did not take chemistry in high school, in junior high I knew what ATP was and the rudiments of its energy exchange function in all living systems. I had picked up a microbiology monograph at a local bookstore and studied it cover to cover. When I enrolled at UW-EC I immediately declared a Biology Major. Later in the undergraduate experience I discovered that it was the Chemistry instead of the Biology in that little monograph that had captured my attention. My tookish side finally determined my location when I went to the Chemistry Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study under Prof. Daniel Kemp as a postdoc. The Kemp group focuses on the particularities of protein and polypeptide secondary structure by synthesizing small models that mimic the behavior of solution protein structure. My education has now taken a new turn. I am now an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky .