I am an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where I teach the modern history of Europe, Germany, science, exploration, and war. I studied physics at Amherst and history at Princeton; I held posts at UPenn, Göttingen, UCLA, and Princeton; and I spent a total of nine years in France, Germany, and China. My biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond took me more than two decades to research. It received an Honorable Mention for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the 2013 PROSE Awards, was shortlisted for the 2014 John Pickstone Prize (awarded every two years by the British Society for the History of Science “to the best scholarly book in the history of science"), and was named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as one of the Best Books of 2014. It has also generated ten reviews, five interviews, seven blog mentions, and one magazine article. I hope that you enjoy it.