ABSTRACT
Looking back on a career likely creates an artificial sense of coherence to one's history. Yet, it is always best to tell a story, and mine describes how I came to focus on the key themes in my work: adolescence, family, social identity, and biobehavioral development. It is a story that has been written by the places in which I trained and worked and by the people who have shaped me as a scholar, and it begins when I first encountered the field of adolescence as a freshman at Cornell University.
