Engagements & Resources

I have two small children, and thus Pixar movies are an inescapable component of my daily existence. Thankfully, somewhere between my youth and now, movie producers realized that their films will be much more popular if they include at least some humor that can be appreciated by parents. But, in the last movie we watched, we were surprised to also find some profound wisdom regarding education and life in general.

Hello and welcome to my blog. When I started my academic career, I received sage advice from my graduate advisor that I should think about how my research will "change the way people think about science." This advice has stuck with me, and motivates nearly everything my lab does.

I was digging through my backpack a couple of weeks ago looking for a snack, and I came across the finishers medal from a Spartan race I had run…in October. Without realizing it, I had been carrying that medal around everywhere I went for the past two months. To work and back every day. Through numerous airports (surprisingly without ever getting flagged at TSA) and across over 10,000 miles of travel. It’s a pretty big medal and weighs over a pound, so definitely enough to be a burden. The funny thing I realized is that it would have actually been less of a burden if it had weighed something like 10 pounds. If that were the case, I would have noticed the weight immediately and taken it out of my backpack before going to work the next day.