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First, a question: does one have to be a member to post here? If not, feel free to delete this thread, but please let me know if you do.

Introduction: Elidan Shaviv.
Sex: male.
Age: 23.
Residence: Piscataway, New Jersey.
Education: some professional.
Current occupation: member of research team.

Appearance: General: short, somewhat heavyset, broad-shouldered, muscular. Pale skinned, pale blue eyes (wide and round), light brown and slightly curly hair, reddish-brown beard and moustache. Walked with a slight limp. Bore a very thin, pale scar alongside his nose, had scarred shoulders from too much sun, and had almost enough hair below the collar to pass for Robin Williams.
Clothing: Varied across the situations, although cargo shorts and a T-shirt were his favorite for warm-weather casual.
Notable jewelry: a wristwatch, sunglasses, very occasionally a dog-collar.

Personality: Best described as mercurial, he could go from sunny optimism to black cynicism relatively quickly and with relative ease. Stable aspects of his personality included voracious and insatiable curiosity, an ability to be amazed by apparently simple and ordinary things like birds or sunsets, empathy, shyness and, to some degree, arrogance.
Prevailing personal philosophy: "Magic is a word for any technology we don't understand."

History: Born into a fairly well-to-do family, he was raised to pursue knowledge and intellectual accomplishment as well as practical accomplishment, and set on a course to a thorough, if not stellar private education. Early in life, that meant learning music and taking small machines apart to see how they worked, then reassembling them. Later in life those drives showed up in an interest in life-sciences research. By virtue of enough work to get through college in three years, a series of happy coincidences, and taking what opportunities presented themselves to him, he was able to find a position in a research group studying some arcane aspects of chimerism and tissue transplants.
A year and a half of work in the chimerism lab led to modest recognition in the field with second-authorship on a ground-breaking paper, suggesting that if a transplant was successful, some of the cells within it would drift throughout the recipient's body and integrate themselves into a variety of other tissues. In the weeks after the paper was published, he received a handful of personal letters. Most were from fellow researchers, offering congratulations and criticism, but one - which was unsigned, and which he almost threw out - offered him a chance to travel while learning more about the topic. By providing a small air-taxi service with the enclosed ticket code, he could fly out to the site for just a nominal fee.

Post-transformation: Always a fan of large, loud and floofy dogs, it would have served him right to be joined into the body of such an animal. On the downside, it would likely make him shorter than he was to start with; but on the plus-side, it would probably generally improve his mood.

Preferred species:
1. Large, floofy Pariah (dog + other canids)
2,3. [Whatever]