My interest in neuroscience probably traces back to reading Freud’s, “The Interpretation of Dreams” the long hot summer before I started high school spending a lot of time in bed scribbling down my dreams and sorting out the “latent” from the “manifest” content of my teenage dreams! I got into wrestling (a great sport) and became obsessed with the concept of “satiety” which naturally led to a senior thesis in 1976 on the role of the hypothalamus in food intake…which of course we still don’t understand though advances have been made. I ended up in the lab of Sebastian Grossman at the University of Chicago making lesions in various locations in the rat’s amygdala and hypothalamus and measuring changes in, of course, satiety! It was not long before I became fed up with making holes in the brain and discovered comparative neurobiology and fantastically complex neural circuits, like the “jamming-avoidance response” of electric fish.I left rats behind and begged my way into the lab of Phil Ulinski where the lab mascot was a Greek tortoise named Clyde and we worked on the brains of turtles and snakes with a goal towards understanding homologies between reptilian and mammalian brains. Like any neuro-kid Cajal wannabe I became obsessed with circuits and the myriad diversity of neural cell types in the deluge of vertebrate neural systems available for study. I forgot all about evolution and my thesis could be called “everything you wanted to know about the cell types of the optic tectum of a garden snake….” Chicago was a hard place to live, with record cold and snow every winter it seemed so when the Australian neuroscientist Jonathan Stone came for a visit the prospect of a postdoc in Sunny Sydney was enticing! I wanted to work on the emerging complexity of multiple visual areas in neocortex but something was lost in translation and I ended up trying to figure out the retinal ganglion cell types of the cat’s retina. Cat’s were in plentiful supply in Sydney since wild ones were considered a terrible pest that devoured all those cute marsupials. It was tough going getting to know the retina, especially with beautiful beaches within walking distance from the lab. However enough data was gathered and with some good luck was able to get my first NIH grant in 1985 to study cat retinal ganglion cells. The rest is history as they say. I was lucky enough to later meet up with great retinal neurobiologists and vision scientists like Bob Rodieck (who introduced me to the primate retina), Christine Curcio (my officemate!), John Troy, Joel Pokorny, Vivianne Smith, Barry Lee, David Williams, Dave Brainard and Julie Schnapf and Peter Detwiler who taught me so much about vision, the retina and doing research and having fun. Right now the lab is focused on working out the circuitry for direction selectivity  (with Peter Detwiler and John Troy) an old problem, but a new one for the primate retina and applying the new methods of “connectomics” to characterizing the foveal microcircuits in the human retina in collaboration (with Christine Curcio).