“I got a look into real-life research and thought, ‘Why not keep going with it?’”
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David De La Mater spent much of his childhood exploring in the woods behind his grandmother’s house, playing among the trees, ferns, stream, salamanders and squirrels.
Then, one day, a developer drove in and razed the property. “Someone sold the woods and stripped it of everything,” De La Mater said. “They cut down the trees, harvested them for lumber, and I had
spent so much time in those woods, becoming intimately acquainted with the creatures that lived there, the plants, the environment; it was a very special place for me. “It was destroyed very quickly and it