Prof. Dowling was born in Hartford, Connecticut in August 1962, the same summer that saw the start of interplanetary exploration with the launch of Mariner 2 to Venus. He became interested in planetary science in high school, inspired by the Voyager 1 and 2 missions to Jupiter in 1979. He moved from MIT to UofL in 1997, after marrying Prof. Beth Bradley in the UofL Dept. of Mathematics; they have two grown daughters.