E is for École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is one of two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, sharing that honor with the more famous Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ).  Situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Lausanne (the capital of the French-speaking canton of Vaud), EPFL is a world-class research university, with strengths in engineering, architecture, and life sciences.  EPFL has over 7,000 students; at the undergraduate level, the vast majority of students are Swiss, but at the graduate level, there are many international students.  The international flavor of EPFL is further reflected in its faculty -- more than 50% are from outside Switzerland.  All told, according to EPFL, there are 107 nationalities represented on campus.  EPFL is consistently ranked among the top universities in Europe and worldwide, particularly in the sciences and engineering, and yet I knew next to nothing about it when I moved there nearly five years ago.

For four years I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Mechanobiology and Morphogenesis, which later became the Laboratory of Lymphatic and Cancer Bioengineering, part of the Institute of Bioengineering (effectively our department) within the School of Life Sciences.  As I said, I knew very little about EPFL, beyond the lab I was joining, and I was very impressed with the superb quality of research at EPFL, the facilities (which are second to none -- truly exceptional), and the international flavor of all the labs.  In our lab, for example, at one point we had over a dozen countries represented!  So in addition to doing great science, I had the chance to learn about other cultures without even setting foot outside the lab.     

What else is there to know about EPFL?  Well, from the cafeteria (which also serves alcohol) on top of the computer science building, you have an incredible view of the Alps.  You are a 15 minute walk from the shores of Lake Geneva and the beautiful lakeside village of St. Sulpice.  The university is home to the provocative and daring Rolex Learning Center, designed by the Japanese architectural firm and Pritzker Prize-winning SANAA.  The campus bar, Satellite, has a good beer selection, especially if you like Belgian brews.  And EPFL was a major consultant in the design of the America's Cup-winning Alinghi yacht.

Depending on your research interests, I would definitely recommend giving EPFL some consideration.  The experience of living and working in another country is incredibly valuable, and the quality of research at EPFL means you can gain this valuable international experience without compromising on your Ph.D. or post-doctoral training.  As you might learn as this A to Z challenge continues, Switzerland holds a special place in my heart, and my time at EPFL is an important part of that experience.

D is for Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons.  D&D.  The granddaddy of them all (by 'them' I mean role-playing games, or RPGs).   I have been playing this game since 1989.  That is a fairly long time -- longer than just about any of my other hobbies or leisure activities.

This post is not about the game, or its history, or the controversies it has sparked, or its recent re-emergence in popular culture (though on this point, the show Community recently had a D&D episode, and Freaks and Geeks featured one with James Franco playing Carlos the Dwarf a little while back), but rather my history with the game.  As I said, I started playing in the summer of 1989, when a friend of mine invited me over to his house to play.  He introduced me to another friend of his, someone I would quickly befriend in middle school, and away we went.  I started with the famous Mentzer Basic rules (in the red box):

I quickly collected the rest of the BECMI series, but soon I had 'graduated' to 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  Sometime in middle school the 2nd edition of AD&D was published, and we started playing that.  Beyond just playing the game, I also became interested in fantasy and science fiction literature, for example reading the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 6th or 7th grade; I was fascinated by mythology, not just Greek but also Norse and Mesopotamian, because of Deities and Demigods; I expanded my vocabulary just to understand what Gary Gygax was talking about in the books, learning words like "dour" and "taciturn"; and perhaps most importantly, I learned what a Lucerne hammer, Bohemian ear spoon, and lochaber axe are (thanks to the infamous Appendix T: The Nomenclature of Pole Arms in the back of Unearthed Arcana).

Then there was a long hiatus, and I did not roll a single d20 (that's right, we use an icosahedral die!) again until graduate school.  I sold all of my old books (which I really regret now) because I did not think, at the time, that this was something adults did.  Boy was I an idiot.  As luck would have it, one of my best friends in graduate school played D&D and had joined a regular group.  I managed to weasel my way into that group, and never looked back.  I played for the rest of graduate school (D&D was now in its 3rd edition), and when I moved to Switzerland, I started searching for a group.

Since I needed an English-speaking group (my French and German are far from being good enough for simple conversations, let alone for gaming), I had to hunt around a bit, and once again I got lucky and found a group in Zurich -- a two hour InterCity train ride from Lausanne (where I was living), but it was worth it.  This brings me to my biggest point: the best part of playing D&D has been the people I have meet.  I have made great friends from my graduate school and Switzerland gaming groups, and recently I even met up with the friend that introduced me to D&D oh so many years ago.  D&D has been a vehicle for me to meet really exceptional people, that I would have otherwise had no business meeting.   Even today, I have joined a fantastic group (playing the 4th edition of the game!) in Philadelphia made up of varied personalities, and I really enjoy it.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that, while the rules, mechanics, and history of the game interest me greatly, the reasons I have stuck with D&D for so many years are that the game is mentally stimulating and socially rewarding.  Simple as that.   

C is for Creux du Van

I lived in Switzerland for four years, and in those four years I explored the country extensively.  One of the places I visited frequently, because I lived relatively close by in Lausanne, was the Jura Mountains.  Everyone knows the Swiss Alps, but the Jura is the other prominent mountain range in Switzerland, running along the France-Switzerland border from Basel to Nyon (roughly).  And one of the most singular sights in the Swiss Jura is the Creux du Van:

 
I have read that it is the Grand Canyon of Switzerland (though that is normally reserved for the Rhine Gorge), but the Creux du Van is not a canyon at all; rather, it is a concave rock face or a cirque.  If you look at it using Google Maps, its dramatic shape is quite evident.  It sits in the canton of Neuchatel, in the Val-de-Travers (home of absinthe), and the pictures I took do not do it justice.  The hike up and down are strenuous (about a 700-800 m change in elevation, at times quite steep), though not too difficult -- we started and finished in the village of Noiraigue, and ascended past la ferme Robert and through forests to the top.  On the way down, we followed le sentier des quatorze contours, a series of switchbacks that quickly drops you back down to where you started.  If you live in Switzerland or nearby France and have not done this hike, or if you are going to be in Switzerland and want to do something other than hit up the Hard Rock Cafe in Interlaken, I highly recommend it.  The Val-de-Travers is a pretty neat place unto itself, where you can purchase absinthe, and visit a wonderful restaurant called La Truite that serves incredibly fresh truite au bleu, homemade absinthe ice cream, and local rosé wines.

For more info and some high quality topographical maps, check out the following links:

• Neuchatel Tourism
• Tourenguide (in German and French)
• Wanderland

B is for Banh Mi

Phew, I had forgotten my letter B topic, after having it pop into my head yesterday afternoon...

This post is dedicated to my friends in Switzerland, who must live in a country where they do not know how to make a decent sandwich -- my heart goes out to them.  This may sound ridiculous, but having grown up outside of Philadelphia, I know my sandwiches.  After all, this is the town that holds up the cheesesteak, hoagie, and roast pork sandwiches as some of its most celebrated foods.  But these are topics for future A to Z posts, perhaps.

The name banh mi is Vietnamese for a baguette (something they picked up during French colonial rule) made with both wheat and rice flour, but it has become the name we use for the sandwiches made with this type of bread.  It is, perhaps outside of the Italian hoagie and really rare roast beef sandwiches/hoagies, my favorite type of sandwich.  On top of this Vietnamese baguette, you put various meats (usually of the fatty, porky persuasion), pickled sliced or shredded carrot and daikon, cilantro, cucumbers, green chili peppers (jalapenos seem to be the go-to here in Philly), pate, and some sort of mayonnaise or aioli.  The array of salty, sour, sweet, spicy, meaty, and fatty flavors, combined with the light crispiness of the Vietnamese baguette (the rice flour is key, so accept no substitutions) and the crunch of the vegetables -- the flavors and textures are vibrant and varied, yet come together so well.  Even the visual aesthetic of the sandwich -- greens, orange, white -- is fantastic.  You can see the French influence -- pate, mayonnaise, a baguette, and the idea of a sandwich in general.

Source: http://aagsa.stanford.edu

The biggest variation you see in a banh mi seems to be meat or meats you use in the sandwich.  You'll see various toppings, like "Vietnamese ham" or "Vietnamese meat", at the sandwich shops, as well as more slighty more descriptive ones like chargrilled pork, B.B.Q. pork (basically Chinese char siu), chicken, beef, meatballs, sausage, tofu, and sardines.  I myself like chargrilled pork, meatballs, and the Vietnamese mystery meat cold cuts, which basically comes from a loaf made of pork parts.  The cubes of fat, and sometimes the gelatin from things like pigs' ears, again add texture and taste to the sandwich.  If that sounds a bit much, the chargrilled and B.B.Q. pork are good places to start.  Sometimes people use Sriracha sauce on a banh mi, though usually the source of heat is from chilis.
 
Sadly, I did not have my first banh mi until I moved to Houston (sadly because that was so late in my life), at a nice Vietnamese restaurant in Rice Village called the Miss Saigon Cafe.  They toasted their baguette, the pork was awesome, and the garlic mayonnaise was really good, almost buttery in its flavor.  I started to try other banh mi in the Houston area (there are a lot of Vietnamese there), but before I knew it I was in Switzerland, land of beautiful mountains, delicious cheeses, decadent chocolates...and not a decent sandwich to speak of.  Then a Vietnamese restaurant opened on Rue de l'Ale for a few months, and I hit them up with terrifying regularity for their banh mi, which was pretty darn good -- especially the bread, which was clearly not a standard French baguette.  Unfortunately they folded up, and I was left having banh mi when I could find them on trips to the US.

Now I am back in Philadelphia, and banh mi have become a local, if not national, phenomenon.  I will give a shout out to Q.T. Vietnamese Sandwich on 10th and Arch, which makes a great banh mi, including a lemongrass tofu one for vegetarians that is sneaky good.  Ba Le, at 6th and Washington, has more variety, though I do not think their bread is as good as Q.T.  I have heard great things about Fu-Wah's vegetarian banh mi, and the sandwiches at Nhu Y.  I have even gone so far as to try the fancier banh mi at Pod, Sampan, and the gourmet food truck Tyson Bees (which is only a banh mi in name).   They are good, but not as good as the Vietnamese sandwich shops.

If you have never had one, you owe it to yourself to try one -- make sure you do a bit of research and find a good place near you, though, I would not want you passing judgment on a mediocre expression of this singular (and sensational) sandwich genre. 

A is for Academia

Wikipedia defines academia as "the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research" (incidentally, that Wikipedia entry also goes into the origin of the term and the histories of the institutions involved in academia, if you are curious). 

I suppose I have been involved in academia since I stepped foot on Penn's campus as a freshman almost 15 years ago.  But as a student, or even as a graduate student or post-doc, you realize that this is just a transition, and for most people at universities, this is a stepping stone to something other than a career in academia.  I was fully inducted into academia until I became a professor this past fall.  I probably decided I wanted to become a professor while doing research at Georgia Tech during a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in 1999.  Research up to that point had been a far cry and a refreshing change from undergraduate work: challenging, stimulating, and giving me the chance to actually create knowledge, instead of simply accumulating it.  Having a father that is an engineering professor did not hurt my motivation, though if he influenced me, it has been too subtle (or at too fundamental a level) for me to notice.

Since it ostensibly is one of the reasons I started this blog, I figured "A is for Academia" would be a good start to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  What is academia, beyond that Wikipedia definition?  Why do I like it (and why might you like it too)?  And what are the (very real) downsides?

It turns out that Wikipedia's definition of academia is pretty good, though I would rephrase it slightly.  It is a community of scholars (I consider students scholars as well, just at a different stage of development) engaged in knowledge creation and dissemination.  These are usually achieved through research and teaching, respectively, but dissemination of knowledge is an important part of research as well, and creating new knowledge can arise from the act of teaching, for both the teacher and the student.  This definition of academia also encompasses what I love about academia and being a professor:

• Working with intelligent, motivated, and curious people (I suppose I mean inquisitive people, and not strange people, though they may be both) -- the "community of scholars".
• A constantly evolving challenge -- because research always yields new questions, new conundrums, and new discoveries, you are forced to constantly learn and keep up.  I worked a couple summer desk jobs, I've heard other people talk about their jobs in both positive and negative lights, and for the most part other professions do not sound appealing to me. YMMV.
• The ability to chart your own path and indulge your own curiosity -- if you can convince a university to give you a faculty position, and convince granting agencies and foundations to fund your work, you can research whatever excites your imagination and stimulates your intellect.  Aside from perhaps artists, musicians, and the self-employed, I know of few professions that offer such unparalleled freedom.  I love this!
• The opportunity to mold future generations of scholars and experts in your field -- this is why I enjoy teaching, and also why I enjoy mentoring students and post-docs.  I want them to go out there and do well, I would like them to learn from my mistakes and my successes...and I like to feel like I am some sage dispensing words of wisdom to the supplicants that have climbed the mountain :)
• The Eureka! moment -- whether it occurs when a student finally grasps a difficult concept in your class, or when your graduate student makes a leap she could not have made three months ago, or when the data you are looking at just scream, "This is what is happening!", the Eureka! feeling is second to none.

If these things I have listed sound good to you, maybe a career in academia would suit you.  However, with the good comes the bad.  Some of these I knew going in, and some I have discovered in my brief time as a newbie professor:

• People's egos become more important than the science -- I do not understand how this happens.  Well, I understand it, because sometimes I can feel my own ego swelling, but science, particularly in research, is such a humbling endeavor.  You fail more often than you succeed, you (should) realize that you know very little and are guessing about a whole lot, and you are surrounded by extremely intelligent people with different perspectives and approaches that often outperform you.  So when people take criticisms of their research as personal attacks and fight back, I do not fully understand it, because that is what happens in research -- knowledge is created, hypotheses are tested and torn down, and most of the time your ideas are wrong, or at least incomplete.
• A lot of passive-aggressive personalities in science, and maybe all of academia.  Enough said.
• Though I said that charting your own intellectual path is a real positive, the reality is that getting funding for your pursuits has never been more difficult, and I am terrified just thinking about how I will fund my students and my lab for the next couple of years, let own the next couple of decades.  This is connected to the pressure you feel as you scratch and flaw your first five or six years towards tenure review, and it is the source, directly or indirectly, of most of the stress I deal with these days.
• Politics -- not that this surprises me, because politics arise any time a group of people get together.  But I would like to think that, as scientists, my colleagues and I would be more objective and rationale.  That is generally not the case, and goes back to my first point about egos in academia.
• The Ivory Tower syndrome -- people often talk about academia vs. the real world, as if academia is somehow disconnected from reality.  And it can be, especially if you are doing basic research, so it is important, I think, to ground yourself in something else, just as a reminder.  At the same time, I do believe in the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, so I do not think all academic pursuits must be obviously practical.  [As an aside, when someone in finance talks about the real world, and juxtaposes it against life as an academic (usually in a condescending way), I grit my teeth.  Really, moving electronic money around to make money, that is real, but my attempts at breast cancer research are "academic"?  Punch in the face.]

Wow, I wrote more than I expected.  And I am not sure it is coherent.  Or particularly informative.  But hopefully it gives a little bit of insight into why an academic career may or may not appeal to someone.

And so begins a month of blogging, from A to Z!  If you are wondering, there will be several themes running throughout, but overall I expect my 26 entries to be pretty eclectic.

Ridley Creek State Park

I decided to go for a short hike on the March equinox, and opted for Ridley Creek State Park, near Newtown Square in the western suburbs of Philadelphia.

Ridley Creek State Park
Location: Glen Mills, PA
Description: An easy hike through Ridley Creek State Park.
Distance: 5.9 km
Net Elevation Change: 55 m
Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Technical Difficulty: Easy
Physical Difficulty: Easy
Rating (out of 5): 2.5


I think I've been to Ridley Creek before, but after walking through it today, it did not seem familiar.  I did not take any pictures, since the bare trees were not very picturesque, but I can imagine the park being very nice later in the spring, during the summer, and during the leaf change in the fall.  The eponymous creek is lower than the surrounding terrain, including the nearby roads, so you do not hear the sounds of traffic, even though you are never far from cars.  There is some nice (though not drastic) elevation change, and the creek itself is very pleasant.

After my hike/walk, I went to Newtown Square's A Cut Above Deli, which according to many reviews on Yelp has one of the best hoagies in the western 'burbs.  After sampling their Italian hoagie (on a seeded roll), I would have to agree, though I think John's is still better.

Check out a Google Maps track of my walk.

Best Substitute Teacher EVER

To briefly continue on the Lovecraft theme, check out H.P. Lovecraft's First Day as a Substitute Teacher at Arkham Junior High School (discovered via Akratic Wizardry).