My life has been devoted to seeking. Long before the sea lion and the surfer showed up to debate theories on why we are the way we are, I stood in white coat questioning how ion channel molecules, heart cells and heart tissue were connected to the heart problems of my patients. I had received my bachelor’s degree in physics from Hamilton College and my medical degree and internal medicine training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. As I grew increasingly fascinated by the heart and all it was capable and incapable of withstanding, I moved cross-country in 1978 to pursue a clinical cardiology fellowship and additional research training at the University of California, Los Angeles, followed by specialized training in cardiac arrhythmias at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. Returning to Los Angeles in 1981, I joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor of Medicine, where I was appointed Director of Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology (1981-1985) and became a member of the UCLA Cardiovascular Research Laboratory (1981-2019). Over the ensuing decades, I became the inaugural holder of the Chizuko Kawata Endowed Chair in Cardiology (1993-2019), the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Laboratory (1997-2019) and the Chief of Cardiology (2001-2019). With a research background in ion channel biophysics and basic and clinical cardiac electrophysiology, I led an interdisciplinary group of scientists combining mathematical and experimental biology to study the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and develop innovative treatments, to prevent injury from heart attacks, and to understand the genetic basis of heart disease using systems biology approaches. I directed a National Institutes of Health Specialized Center of Research in Sudden Cardiac Death (1995-2005), a National Institutes of Health Program Project Grant (2005-2017), and multiple other federal and non-federal grants.