Michael H. Dickman was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. After getting a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Cincinnati, he went to the University of California at Irvine, learned X-ray crystallography and obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry. Then he attended Franklin Pierce Law Center (now affiliated with the University of New Hampshire), where he received his J.D. He practiced patent law in Washington, DC for a while. After that he went back into chemistry, doing research and teaching at Georgetown University and at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He is the author or co-author of about one hundred papers published in international scientific journals, and eventually managed to teach science at the graduate, undergraduate, high school, and middle school levels in the USA. Mr. Dickman now writes puzzles, fiction, and poetry when he isn't doing ceramics or computer programming.
