INTERESTS

Outside academics, I spend a good portion of my free time playing guitar, particularly progressive metal and metalcore, and listening to a wide range of heavy music. You might occasionally find me nodding along to odd time signatures more often than I should in public. I am always happy to jam with fellow musicians, so feel free to reach out! My playlists usually feature artists such as Opeth, Ne Obliviscaris, Dance Gavin Dance, Lamb of God, ERRA, All That Remains, Pantera, etc.

I religiously follow football and have been a lifelong supporter of FC Barcelona (Visca el Barça!). Watching them play at their best feels like poetry in motion. As Thierry Henry once said, “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”. My mood on any given day, is to a statistically significant extent, determined by the outcome of Barcelona’s most recent match. 

Having grown up watching Lionel Messi, I firmly believe in the existence of aliens. The deeper you look into his numbers, and more importantly the consistency with which he produced them over nearly two decades, the more they seem to defy comparison. His statistics are so far removed from the norm that they often feel less like elite performance and more like an outlier that challenges the assumptions behind the game itself. 

I’m also an aviation geek. 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.

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).