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Samuel C. Conway (born June 4, 1965 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania ) is an American researcher in the pharmaceutical, biomedical and agrochemical fields of organic chemistry. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Dartmouth College.

Outside of the scientific community Conway, better known as Uncle Kage, is a volunteer entertainer and auctioneer, and a published author. Conway is widely known within the furry fandom, due to his involvement in fan activities from the early 1990s to the present day. He has acted as a furry fan representative to the science fiction fandom and to the wider world by being the chairman and chief organizer of Anthrocon, the largest furry convention in the world.

Academic and scientific activities
A 1986 graduate of Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Conway subsequently studied at the Burke Chemical Laboratories of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He obtained his Ph.D. from Dartmouth in 1991. His doctoral thesis concerned the attempted generation of indolyne (an aromatic compound related to indole). His work has been published in various scientific journals, including Synthetic Communications, Organic Preparations and Procedures International and Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry.

After college, Conway took a postdoctoral appointment in Chicago, and subsequently worked as a contractor for the Food and Drug Administration, a researcher for Bionetics, a medicinal chemist for Avid Therapeutics and researcher for Message Pharmaceuticals. He was employed by Cerexagri from May 2001 to June 2007, moving to work as principal chemist for West Pharmaceutical Services. Conway has eleven professional publications and three patents to his name, including one for recyclable packaging material.

Convention chairman
Conway became the chairman of Anthrocon in 1999, after his invitation as a guest of honor in 1998. Under his leadership, Anthrocon was incorporated and moved to Philadelphia. The convention's attendance grew from 804 to 2,489 over the period 1999 to 2006, necessitating a further move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Conway is the public face of Anthrocon; he is also responsible for public relations, negotiating hotel contracts, managing the convention's finances, damage control and numerous other activities before, during and after the convention.

Media dealings
Conway has historically dissuaded members of the fandom from responding to the mass media and news media, due in part to sensationalist coverage like the 2001 Vanity Fair article in which he was quoted. His standard response to the media has been: "Anthrocon is a private event held on private property. Its membership is not interested in being the subject of your documentary."

Conway revised his policies slightly with Anthrocon's move to Pittsburgh in 2006. While no television program, magazine or "tabloid" representatives were present, several newspapers were invited to attend, and did, including the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Pittsburgh City Paper, which printed both a preview and an extensive review. When local television station KDKA-TV showed up, Conway gave a short television interview outside the convention hotel. In November 2006 he gave a radio interview to Dublin 98FM.

Storyteller
Conway styles himself as "Furrydom's Storyteller", and makes an annual appearance on the stage of Anthrocon in what has come to be known as Uncle Kage's Story Hour. The entertainment typically consists of four or five extended personal anecdotes of a humorous nature. His stage name was the result of his first storytelling experience at ConFurence in 1994, and is a derivative of his fandom name Kagemushi Goro (Shadow Bug Goro) - a reference to Kagemusha.

Conway is regularly invited to tell his stories as a guest of honor at other conventions, both within and without the furry fandom, including I-CON, Eurofurence,  ConClave, and Camp Feral!. Gross sales from recordings of his Story Hours were over US$2600 in 2004; no profit was realized, as the intention was to increase membership and awareness of Anthrocon.

Auctioneer
Conway's first auction was at Albany Anthrocon 1997. Since then, he has presided over auctions which have raised over US$66,000 for a variety of local wildlife charities at Anthrocon alone. He has performed similar services at other fan conventions, including Midwest FurFest. Conway says his techniques — which are influenced by Phil Foglio and Joe Mayhew and often include humour and appeals to pity, novelty or scarcity — have been declared "unprofessional" by some other auctioneers; but they achieve results, including the sale of the "last brick" from a previous year's demolished hotel for US$200 in 2006.

Published fiction
While Conway is best known for his spoken word, he is also a published author of several short stories.

Conway's works include:


 * "Tweaked in the Head", in Flights of Fantasy (December 1999)
 * Conway was invited to write this story due to his interest in birds of prey, particularly the Red-tailed Hawk
 * "The Secret of Wollknäul", in HistoriMorphs I (June 2001)
 * "Six", in Anthrolations #5 (July 2002)
 * Nominated for the 2002 Ursa Major Awards as "Best Anthropomorphic Short Story"
 * "Dead End", in Breaking the Ice: Stories from New Tibet (January 2004)
 * "The Good Bird of Nanking", in HistoriMorphs II (June 2004)
 * "It Takes A Fox", in HistoriMorphs III (June 2006)

Other activities

 * Conway was a long-term volunteer for the American Red Cross Disaster Service, but quit due to his perception of high-level corruption in the organization. He remains the Emergency Management Coordinator for his home town, Malvern, Pennsylvania.
 * Conway was once a member of the board of directors for the Great Valley Nature Center
 * Conway is an "active and proud" participant in the MAD Scientist Network, a free questions-and-answers resource organized by the medical school of Washington University in St. Louis.
 * In March 1990, Conway became an experimental bone marrow donor for Mark Stevenson, a 4-year-old suffering from Hunter syndrome. The operation - the first of its kind involving an unrelated donor - was a success. Conway became an active volunteer for the National Marrow Donor Program, helping to add over 500 entries to the their donor registry.