Personal
I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon and thought that it would be nice to see the East Coast while getting a college degree, so I decided to go to MIT in Boston (Cambridge, if you are nitpicky).  I studied physics and economics as an undergrad, and after a bit of soul-searching chose to get a PhD in physics.  After spending four years suffering through the long and cold Boston winter I decided to move out to the San Francisco Bay Area in order to study at Berkeley.  Despite not going to grad school in economics, in many ways I still view the world as an economist.  To find out what I mean by that, check out some of the links on my politics page.
Amazingly enough, as a postdoc at MIT I seem to have found a way to combine my interests in physics, biology, mathematics, and economics.  I had always enjoyed books such as The Selfish Gene (by Richard Dawkins).  The evolutionary explanations were simple yet powerful, and I was very excited when I realized that microbes provided a means to quantitatively probe some of these theoretical models in evolutionary biology.
More recently, I got married to Sena Kang and had a son in 2010.  When not spending time with my family, I like to hike, play volleyball or tennis, eat, argue about politics, and read.  If you are looking for a good book to read (especially non-fiction), please go to my books page.