I originally came to do my postdoctoral research at a specific Lab in the NIH (NHLBI) which was world-known in renal physiology. My doctoral thesis work had been in prostaglandin biochemistry in the kidney and I planned an independent research career pursuing physiological questions in the kidney from a molecular and biochemical approach, something quite new at the time in the renal field. My postdoctoral research worked so well that I was offered a tenure-track principal investigator position at the NIH. I was tenured five years later and led my own independent research lab for 15 years. The principal topic of my independent research was gene regulation by osmotic stress in the mammalian kidney and how the molecular mechanisms compared to other organisms under such stress throughout the evolutionary chain (e.g., plants in drought, microorganisms in the Dead Sea, etc.).