To answer the question as if you were an old friend from college, since graduation, I stayed on in the lab I was at in undergrad to work full-time for two years through the height of the pandemic. From there, I speed-ran a master’s program in biomedical engineering to get an engineer’s perspective on biological problems and did some research in a neural engineering lab in the department before graduating. The day after graduation, I started working for an RNA therapeutics biotech startup working with iPSCs (stem cells) to study neurodegeneration, where I’ve been for the past two years. I’ve just sent in my two weeks’ notice to take some time off before returning to the aforementioned neural engineering lab to do my PhD starting this fall.
This isn’t a personal blog, though. My goal with this website and everything I’ll be writing here isn’t to talk about myself and my career but rather unravel, examine, and organize my thoughts from the last five years. After nearly two decades of formal education and being told what to think and learn, I have done some intellectual flâneuring. To quote the Wikipedia entry, a flâneur is “an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life.“ On some weekends and weekday evenings, I've enjoyed doing this quite literally, strolling the streets of New York City without any agenda. I've learned and synthesized a great deal of knowledge and ideas, both from the ivory tower and from the streets of which I need to 1) make sense, 2) disseminate with the purpose of sharing the fruits of these observations with people who have not had the resources to do so, and 3) put forth into the courtroom of ideas* to be interrogated from many angles.
These intellectual wanderings have taken me everywhere from the Western philosophy canon, biosecurity infrastructure, urban design, functional and non-functional institutions, pop culture, to niche X (formerly Twitter) subcultures, robust explorations of utopia, business affairs in Africa, the future of governance, and down countless rabbit holes. Through this ongoing series of essays, I hope to uncover some common threads that run through these seemingly disparate topics, to clarify the current state of human affairs as I see it, and, informed by this modest lucidity, to prescribe future courses of action.
Tim
*Ronald Moore (philosophy)