Hope you're all feeling better! Ear infections in little kids can be pretty hard on everyone, I know. Take it easy :)
I'm currently a grant manager & contract officer in the biomedical research field, in Seattle, Washington. I have no good explanation for how I ended up here. Last I remember I was working on a PhD in East/Central Asian studies, and before that… hrm, another A.B.D. in anthropology. (Central Asian ethnic history & nationalism in both cases, though Mongol-Manchu-Chinese Central Asia rather than the benighted western lands we're investigating here.) Total lack of serious commitment to leading the academic life, certainly, but it's provided plenty of raw materials for RPG'ing, I reckon. Tekumel, Traveller, and more recently COC/DG.
Unfortunately, I've only played DG a couple times before — with a bunch of people I found really, really horrible on a personal level, but were pretty good horror gamers. But my handle on Cthulhoid gaming is mostly of an armchair nature, and also I've never tried play-by-wiki before, so I'm really looking forward to this for several reasons. Other than that, I haven't been actively gaming at all for a couple years, I'm sorry to say.
I'm creeping up on 40; American, though I grew up as entirely as an expat (East/Southeast Asia, USSR mostly) until I came to the States for university. I've been to Tashkent (many years ago) but never Samarkand! Female, though very bad at it. Not Japanese, despite the name — my parents were weirdos, I was born in the '60s, and odd choices were made; a tradition I haven't entirely managed to turn my back on. "William Lowell" is, at this point, a pastiche of two or three actual Central Asian scholars at a certain Ivy League institution I had the strained privilege of knowing… though I don't think any fantasy RPG character of mine could ever live up to the standard of (Anti-)Heroic Whackjob that they set in cold hard reality :)