I did my undergraduate studies at The University Colege Cork, Ireland, where I majored in Plant Science and minored in Microbiology graduating with B.Sc. Hons in 1987.  I did my PhD studies under the mentorship of Dr. Stanton Gelvin at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.  My PhD work focused on gene regulation in Agrobacterium tumefaciens and I graduated in 1992. I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Interdisciplinary Plant Group at The University of Columbia-Missouri, Columbia, MO under the mentorship of Dr. Roy Morris from 1992 to 1994 and my work was on Agrobacterium tumefaciens and cytokinin production. My second post-doctoral work was also at the University of Columbia-Missouri under the guidance of Dr. Guri Johal.  In his lab I cloned the lethal leaf-spot 1 (lls1) gene from maize. I joined the faculty at The University of Toledo in 1998 and was tenured in 2004 and promoted to full professor in 2019.  My work has focused on programmed cell death in plants, plant nutrition, protein transport, gene regulation and phylogenetics.