I was born in Syracuse, New York, where I attended public high school.  I attended Yale College from which I was graduated with a BA in English. I attended the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.  I completed a pediatric residency and a fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. I did another fellowship (in clinical epidemiology) as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale.  I joined the faculty of the Department of Pediatrics in 1983 in both General Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases.  My current titles are Professor of Pediatrics and of Epidemiology. I am Vice Chair for Research of the Department of Pediatrics, Co-Director of Education for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, Deputy Director of Yale’s Investigative Medicine PhD Program and co-PI of Yale’s Kl-2 and Tl-1 Programs and of the T32 training program in Pediatric Infectious Diseases.