Am I the Andrew Pierce you're looking for?

Well, probably not. One problem with the Internet is that the weakness of using a person's full name as a unique identifier is exposed. For example, the not-very-complete www.411.com lists multiple different people named Andrew Pierce in Kentucky. I guess we could identify people with unique numbers (with 6+ billion people the number needs to be at least ten digits long) but that's not much fun.  Currently we tend to use some combination of name and typical geographical locale which also isn't very satisfying.

 

Identifying a person by their history (where they've been hanging out)

I was born in Florida USA, but grew up in Guelph, Ontario Canada. I went to the Laurine Avenue Public School from kindergarten through grade two, then went to Brock Road Public School for grades three through six. Grade seven and eight at College Avenue Public School and grades nine through thirteen at Centennial Collegiate Vocational Institute (all in Guelph). Then I went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto and studied molecular biology, astronomy and philosophy. I emigrated to the United States to do a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA where I met my wife Heather. We were married in Tampa, Florida, USA. I did two years of postdoctoral research with Paul Modrich at Duke University studying the biochemistry of DNA mismatch repair while Heather finished up her Ph.D. and then we moved to New York City (where we currently reside). We both used to work at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where she was a genetic counselor and I did postdoctoral research into mechanisms of DNA double-strand break repair with Maria Jasin. I also spent a lot of time doing inline speedskating in Central Park. Now we live in Lexington, Kentucky. Heather runs a cancer genetics counseling program for the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky and I manage a translational cancer research lab.  We have two kids:  Morgan and Ford.

See also: biographical info and pix for other recent details.

 

Genealogical weirdness

Ever notice how in family trees pretty much everyone just gets three entries: where and when they were born, where and when they were married (and to whom), and where and when they died. I was born in Florida, and married in Florida, now I just have to die in Florida and from my entry you'd think I'd spent my whole life there. In reality, I was only there as an accident of birth and have hardly really been in Florida at all.


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