Timeline of major personal and professional developments:

  1969 BA from UCLA, married and moved to England
  1971 Escaped marriage. Having lost immigrant status in US, lived in Frankfurt while regaining green card. Worked as nanny for a Greek family and then made thin sections of rocks in paleontology museum.
  1972-1975 PhD, UC Santa Barbara (how firefly light organs function)
  1975-1977 postdoc at University of Wisconsin, Madison (voltage-sensitive ion channels in biological membranes)
  1976 married William M. Sugden (regulation of cell division by Epstein-Barr Virus)
  1977-1979 postdoc at Harvard Medical School (synaptic transmission of visual information)
  1979-present professor, Departments of Neurophysiology and Physiology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (how neurons enable mammals to hear)
  1985 son born, Arthur U. Sugden
  On the second try I married the right person. Bill and I are both biologists and are fortunate to have faculty positions in the same university in different and excellent departments. We are both very happy with our professions, involving teaching and research, and feel very lucky to be able to share the joys and frustrations with one another.
  From my (possibly biased) perspective our son, Arthur, is a thoughtful, lively, positive person whom it was somewhat difficult to send off to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He loves it there, torn between majors in psychology and astronomy. One year after Arthur left, my father moved to Madison after my mother died and now lives two blocks from us and comes for dinner every night.
  In 2002 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and eventually had chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation. Oddly, this was in many ways a positive experience as my family and my colleagues were so very kind and supportive. Bill was always there. I learned how much a son can help from Arthur. When I began to lose my hair I warned Arthur that he might be startled when he saw me without a hat. His response set priorities and made it easy to accept all kinds of physical changes: "Mom, you're not your hair!" Now I feel excellent and appreciate it properly.