Occupation: I am a professor of biology at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.

Family: My wife, Paula, who teaches at UConn Waterbury, also biology. My son, Graham, is 20 and in his second year at UConn in engineering and my daughter, Tilly, is a senior at Newtown High School.

Pets: We have a dog, Maggie. She is a terrier/lab mix and she’s 7 years old. We have a cat, same age, named Mudge. She is a scrawny little yellow cat who allows us to live in the house. We got them at the same time, so they grew up together.

How long have you lived in Newtown? We moved here in 1993 from Southern California.

What do you like to do in your free time? I find working with wood therapeutic, that is, splitting, cutting, and hauling it. We heat with wood. We are coming up on maple syrup season, and I tap about ten trees. And I like to complain about the Yankees, being a Red Sox fan.

Do you have a favorite author? It comes and goes. My favorite author used to be Frank McCourt, until he wrote his third book. Now I like Jared Diamond. He translates evolutionary ideas for the layperson and I like Richard Dawkin, another evolutionary biology writer.

Do you have a favorite vacation destination? New Hampshire. My five siblings and I own a hunting cabin in central New Hampshire. There is no heat, no Internet, no TV, no stress. I travel enough for my research— mostly in South America, lately, where I study species relationships — so I don’t like to travel far for vacation.

What is the best thing about Newtown? On one hand, there’s a small town feel, but on the other, traffic takes away from that. We have a good school system, but the overcrowding is a problem. In a sense, Newtown is suffering from its own success.

If you could time travel, would you go to the future or the past? I think I’d go to the past, to the late 1800s. The work I do in South America is species relationships; I collect plants. So I’d like to have traveled with early naturalists and to have experienced discovery the way they did.

Do you have a personal philosophy? Find your passion and follow it. But don’t take yourself too seriously.

Do you have a favorite memory? Probably my childhood, being a kid growing up in small town New Hampshire. Everybody knows who you are — that’s the best and the worst thing. I loved walking in the woods and swimming in the river about a mile behind my house.