Samuel Conway

Samuel Charles Conway (born June 4, 1965) works as an American researcher in organic chemistry, focusing on pharmaceuticals, biomedicine, and agrochemicals. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Dartmouth College. Alongside his scientific career, Conway is active in the furry fandom; since 1999, he has chaired and organized Anthrocon, a major furry convention. He also writes, serves as a volunteer emergency coordinator, performs as an entertainer, and works as an auctioneer. Conway graduated from Ursinus College in Pennsylvania in 1986, then studied at Dartmouth’s Burke Chemical Laboratories, earning his Ph.D. in 1991 with a thesis on attempts to generate indolyne, an aromatic indole-related compound. Afterward, he held a postdoctoral role in Chicago, then worked as a contractor for the Food and Drug Administration, a researcher for Bionetics, a medicinal chemist at Avid Therapeutics (March 1995–August 1997), and a researcher at Message Pharmaceuticals (August 1997–April 1999). He spent two years in organ distribution at the National Disease Research Interchange, then worked as a regulatory chemist for crop protection company Cerexagri from May 2001 to June 2007, when he became a principal chemist at West Pharmaceutical Services. By July 2013, he was employed near Raleigh, North Carolina. He has authored eleven professional publications and holds two patents: one covers compounds for treating hepatitis B in combination with lamivudine, and another relates to recyclable packaging. His work has appeared in journals such as Heterocycles, Synthetic Communications, Organic Preparations and Procedures International, Water Research, Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, and Current Organic Chemistry. Conway first encountered the furry fandom at Noreascon 3, the 1989 Worldcon, and has been involved in fan activities from the early 1990s onward. He became Anthrocon’s chairman in 1999 after being invited as a guest of honor the previous year. Under his leadership, the convention incorporated and moved to Philadelphia; attendance grew from 842 to 2,489 between 1999 and 2006, prompting a move to Pittsburgh, where 3,390 attended in 2008. He handles public relations, hotel contracts, finances, damage control, and other convention tasks, and also advises fans on presenting the fandom to the public. Conway discourages fandom members, especially Anthrocon attendees, from engaging with mass media, partly due to sensationalist coverage such as a 2001 Vanity Fair article in which he was quoted. In 2003, he stated his standard media response was: “Anthrocon is a private event held on private property. Its membership is not interested in being the subject of your documentary.” However, he relaxed this stance after the 2006 move to Pittsburgh. While no TV, magazine, or tabloid representatives attended, several newspapers were invited and covered the event, including the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Pittsburgh City Paper. When local station KDKA-TV arrived, Conway gave a short television interview outside the hotel. In November 2006, he did a radio interview with Dublin’s 98FM. Anthrocon still tightly controls media access and has a policy forbidding unmonitored dealings with unauthorized media. Conway calls himself “Furrydom’s Storyteller,” appearing annually at Anthrocon for “Uncle Kage’s Story Hour,” which typically features four or five extended personal anecdotes. His stage name comes from his first storytelling experience at ConFurence in 1994 and derives from his fandom name Kagemushi Goro (Shadow Bug Goro), a reference to Kagemusha. He is regularly invited to tell stories at other conventions, including I-CON, Eurofurence, ConClave, and Camp Feral!. Gross sales from recordings of his Story Hours exceeded $2,600 in 2004, though no profit was made, as the goal was to boost Anthrocon membership and awareness. Conway’s first auction was at Albany Anthrocon 1997. Since then, he has presided over auctions that raised over $66,000 for local wildlife charities at Anthrocon alone, and has done similar work at other conventions like Midwest FurFest. He says his techniques, influenced by Phil Foglio and Joe Mayhew, include humor, appeals to pity, novelty, and scarcity. Within the fandom, Conway is also an author of short stories published by Sofawolf Press. In May 1998, he was invited to write a story based on his interest in birds of prey, especially the red-tailed hawk, resulting in “Tweaked in the Head,” published in December 1999 in *Flights of Fantasy*. He later contributed to the first issue of *HistoriMorphs*, a fanzine mixing historical fiction with anthropomorphic animals, with “The Secret of Wollknäul,” set in Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, published in June 2001. He wrote “The Good Bird of Nanking” and “It Takes A Fox” for subsequent issues.