About Me
I am from a small town called Ranchi in India. If I start writing about myself I could go on forever. But, since you are interested I would first start with the boring part of my academic background and then some fun stuff.
After finishing my high school from Delhi Public School, Ranchi, I had a stint of four years at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay studying Engineering Physics. Once both IIT and I got sick of each other (just kidding!), I moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL, USA for a PhD in Physics. I began working with Prof. Ali Yazdani doing fun stuff with building a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) to study high-Tc superconductors. Ali decided to be adventurous and moved from UIUC to Princeton University in August 2005 along with the entire lab setup. As I was enjoying working with STMs, I decided to move with him as well. Princeton was really nice to us and built us a brand new facility with a fancy name Princeton Nanoscale Microscopy Lab (PNML). It took us about 4 months in the move but once we were well ensconced we managed to do some really cool experiments and learnt a whole lot of new stuff about these high-Tc materials. I have spent almost 6 years studying these superconductors and the whole journey has been pretty exciting and rewarding but it is time to move on and find out what other fun things are out there. So this is my academic background. If you have been able to stand all this then you will be duly rewarded, as now I will tell you some fun stuff about my life.
I am very passionate about tennis and am an ardent fan of Roger Federer. Other than tennis, I keep myself busy with rock-climbing, gym, chess, pool, tango, photography, occasional adrenaline rush like skydiving, etc. I have been trying to learn to play the guitar but haven’t really made a serious attempt so far. At one point I had even grown my hair... even that didn’t help ;) I guess I am going to take it up seriously one of these days... I want to travel the whole world, especially South America and New Zealand. I have so far travelled to Canada and mostly in Europe: Sweden, Holland, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Greece. So there is a long list to be completed. Trust me, I am working on it! Of all the cities that I have been to, New York and Mumbai stand out as my favorite ones. Amsterdam is another cool city. I am a fun-loving guy who gets along with most people. I get easily amused with what surrounds me. I guess I am just another happy guy trying to stay that way.
That’s all for now. I will hopefully keep updating this page and keep sharing my experiences with you all.
Cheers!