Biography
As a child, Ted spent his summers in New Hampshire watching nature, and in particular, ants. He carried this interest to college, where he studied biology and performed research in the lab of E. O. Wilson. In collaboration with Dr. Nigel Franks, he published Dominance and reproductive success among slave-making worker ants in the journal Nature. After college, he worked for 11 years as a portfolio manager and proprietary trader at firms including Morgan Stanley, First Boston, and J.P. Morgan. He and his wife took a sabbatical in the cloud forest in Monteverde, Costa Rica in 1996 where he got his first taste of teaching. When he returned to New York, he became a biology and computer science teacher at private schools in New York and New Jersey. Ted lives in Manhattan with his wife, son, compost bin, and an occasional invasion of fruit flies.