Who was a Professor in mineralogy that is also the source of his being a mineralogist?”
Bob Downs was born in 1955 in Brandon, Manitoba. He completed his B.Sc. in mathematics at the University of British-Columbia in 1986 after ten years as a conctruction worker. He built the Camble Street Bridge, Burrard and Granville Street subway stations in Vancouver, and the Dempster Highway in the Yukon, to name a few of his projects. He worked as a professional mineral collector, drilling and blasting rocks. After stints as assistant curator of the UBC mineral museum under Joe Nagel and in the National Mineral Collection in Ottawa with Gary Ansell, Bob moved to Virgini aTech and obtained an M.Sc. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1992 in mineralogy under the joint directions of Jerry Gibbs and Monte Boisen (math). His graduate studies were focused mainly on the analysis of thermal motion in crystals. He then accepted a post-doctoral position at the Geophysical Lab in Washington D.C. to learn high-pressure crystallographic techniques with Bob Hazen, Larry Finger, and Charlie Prewitt. In 1996 Bo
