RN: After 15 years in Portland, OR working at Oregon Health Sciences University, Felix and I uprooted our young family and moved to Burlington, VT to work at the University of Vermont (UVM) in 2001.  The same year we arrived, Martin (Marty) Hruska entered the PhD program in Anatomy & Neurobiology and asked if he could train in my lab.  He had just gotten his BS in Biology at UVM, and he was young, eager to learn, and very competent in the lab, so I took him.  I have never regretted this.  Twenty-three years later we arrived on Marty’s doorstep in Morgantown, WV, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Department at West Virginia University (WVU).  What a difference 23 years makes!  Young and single Marty, the gymnast and soccer player, is now married to Nicole and they have two lovely, super-smart daughters and a wonderfully spacious house.  He is an awesome daddy! He also took us on a tour of his lab in a brand new research building and he totally awed us with the super-resolution microscopy technology he is using. Another “baby” all growed up!!

FE. Marty is all that Rae said…and then some. His current scientific interests are close to mine and maybe we will even continue to talk! His wife Nicole is also great…what a wonderful family. Their daughters are fun, sweet and too smart for me…I got killed at Clue. My only excuse is that the smiling winner drank less wine than me.

Also, you have to realize that around here they take their “almost heaven” motto very seriously