Art by Chuck Weber
Russ Vanderboom, Ph.D.
I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I’ve had 14 years of Catholic education, and another 12 years of public university education at Boulder, Colorado, Regensburg, Germany, and Madison, Wisconsin. I served as a Marine in 1970, where I was trained as a journalist. I later built a career in agricultural journalism in Wisconsin. I worked as a reporter and managing editor for a weekly newspaper. As a journalist in rural Wisconsin, I learned to be a storyteller. I observed the lives and times of people who come from our farms. I wrote about those people in scores of newspaper articles published during my early career. I’ve been a dairy and beef farmer, and I have raised produce that I sold at a farmer’s market in Madison, Wisconsin. At a key moment in the course of my career, I realized that if I was to flourish in journalism, I would do well to become a subject matter expert in an area of agriculture about which I was passionate. At the time, dairy cows captured my imagination. I truly loved bovines. At the University in Madison, I studied dairy science – particularly genetics, reproductive endocrinology, and mammary physiology. Molecular aspects of endocrinology swept me away; my passion for estrogen-regulated mammary gland developmental physiology in bovine mammals evolved into a keen, driving interest in the pathology of breast cancer in humans. Medical science became the focus of my second career. After researching breast cancer during my post-doctoral fellowship at Mayo Clinic, I combined my interests in science and journalism as the medical science writer for research at the Cleveland Clinic, and then as the senior science writer at the American Association for Cancer Research in Philadelphia. I recently retired from a career in science writing and research at Mayo. I am married to Catherine Prouty Vanderboom, Ph.D. in the final phase of her research career in community care nursing. We have two children, Michael and Anne. Photography and the training of dogs come easily to me, and I’m a pretty good cook. I have written a book called The Good Guy List.
Contact me at: RussVanderboom@rvanonline.com