In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, we follow the journey of Billy Pilgrim, a poorly trained, fatalistic soldier in the United States army in World War II. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, Billy is abducted by aliens in a flying saucer, and taken to a distant planet…

In the pandemic summer of 2020 I found myself introspecting about something important to me — why do I do science? In an attempt to answer this question, I dove into the history of science, science funding, and my childhood, and wrote this essay. This article first appeared in Economic…

The story of my first scientific paper. Rummaging through some old notebooks, I found notes from my first ever research project, done as an undergraduate researcher. Once I recovered from the burst of nostalgia, with the added perspective of six years of graduate school, I realized that I was then…