INTERESTS

Outside academics, I spend a disproportionate amount of time with a guitar in hand and metal music in my ears. If you see me aggressively headbanging in public spaces (which happens more often than I’d like to admit), rest assured nothing is wrong; the song just slaps hard. I have yet to successfully pass a “try not to headbang” challenge. I am always up for a jam (feel free to reach out via email!). My music taste resides somewhere between odd time signatures, demonic screams, angelic cleans, face-melting riffs, spine-crushing breakdowns, and solos that deal emotional damage. 

Opeth, Dance Gavin Dance, Periphery, Lamb of God, Invent Animate to name some of the usual suspects.

I religiously follow football and am a die-hard supporter of FC Barcelona (Visca el Barça! i Visca Catalunya!). I firmly believe (an opinion shared by anyone with two functioning eyes and a brain) the 2008–09 sextuple winning Barcelona team is arguably the greatest football team ever assembled. As Thierry Henry once rightly put it: “I don’t care where you’re from. But if you tell me you love football and don’t love Barcelona, you have a problem.”

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in the era of Lionel Messi, a statistically inconvenient outlier in football history. Any model that treats him as a typical sample point is fundamentally misspecified. Alternative explanations for his existence remain on the table; the “glitch in the matrix” hypothesis has not yet been falsified. As Ray Hudson rightly said: “They tell me that all men are equal in God’s eyes, this player makes you seriously think about those words. Sir Isaac Newton looks down from up above and says, 'About that gravity thing, I was wrong, Messi was right!' He teases gravity.”

I’m also an aviation geek, and when I say geek, the kind who gets emotional about winglets and engines. Aircrafts are among the most complex yet beautiful machines ever engineered by humans, and they’re so safe that you’re statistically more likely to get hurt on the way to the airport than in the air. There’s something deeply poetic about a 100-ton aluminum-alloy tube with 6 million parts, cruising at near Mach speeds at 35,000 ft, behaving exactly as the equations on paper promised.

If you’re flying with me and there’s a dramatic call for help from the cockpit, rest assured I will not attempt to fly the plane myself or rely on my years of Microsoft Flight Simulator and NatGeo’s Air Crash Investigation as transferable credentials. Any confidence I display in that scenario is purely theoretical and severely under-validated.

For fun, here’s a challenge: email me a few photos of the aircraft you’re flying on, and I’ll try to identify the aircraft type and the airline.

When I’m not doing any of the above, I enjoy hitting the gym and putting my body through frequent bulk–cut cycles, oscillating like a poorly damped system. Over the years I’ve gone from 230 lb → 160 lb → 210 lb, repeatedly. At my extremes, I’ve consumed ~6,000 calories in a day and, at the other end of the spectrum, completed a 3-day zero-calorie fast. Whether this makes me a disciplined fitness enthusiast or a masochist in disguise remains an open research question (collaborators welcome).