The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I'm looking at a run for Senate in 2008 but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.

The long cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

American families families back home in Minnesota know only too well that out-of-pocket expenses for health care have been rising at an astonishing rate.

I thought if anyone need a leg up it was our foster children. So I started getting involved in education reform and that was back in 1998. And as a result of all the reform work that I had done people urged me to run for the Minnesota state Senate. I did I was there for six years.

I have an education degree from the University of Minnesota and I was a teacher for about a minute.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota then Oxford College in Minnesota and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.