Professor Curran's high school chemistry teacher told him not to major in chemistry, but like many headstrong teenagers, he did not heed that advice.  He earned an A.B. in Chemistry, magna cum laude, from the College of the Holy Cross in 1983, and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1988 from M.I.T.  After a year of postdoctoral work in enzymology/molecular biology at Harvard  Medical School, Professor Curran joined the research staff at Alkermes, then a startup biotechnology company in Cambridge, MA.  From 1991-2000 Professor Curran was on the faculty at Holy Cross.  He came to Trinity in 2000.  In 2010 he received the Thomas Church Brownell Prize for excellence in teaching, and in 2019 he was awarded the Trustee Award for Faculty Excellence.  Professor Curran has been a co-author on 33 peer-reviewed papers; 19 of these papers have 51 different undergraduate student co-authors.  He lives in Wethersfield, CT and frequently bikes to Trinity.  Beyond Trinity Professor Curran is involved with his church (St. Patrick-St. Anthony in Hartford), where he co-facilitates the LGBTQ+ Friends and Family Support Group. He is also a distance runner who, in 2022, has run the Colchester Half-Marathon and the Keane Foundation 5K (1st place in his age group); next up is the Hartford Half-Marathon in October.  The most recent book he has read is The Guncle by Steven Rowley.