I used to also study computer science at AUBG (for three semesters, 1995-1996), but transferred to Texas
to get a B.S. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, 1996-1999) instead. I got my
Ph. D. in Astrophysics from Princeton University working with Michael Strauss on Balmer line accretion
disk emission in active galaxies (1999-2003). Now I am a postdoc at Penn State working with Niel Brandt
and Don Schneider.

 The only other thing (besides astronomy and books) in my life these days is Roman. We were married on
December 13th, 2004 in New York city hall. We left for Europe the same day and had many parties in the
following weeks.

I love traveling, even though recently it's mostly for conferences. Here are some pictures from the
south of France, Venice (Italy), Switzerland, 2002 Swiss Expo, Florence (Italy), the Vatican, and
beach island state park  (NJ).

I am currently reading Robert Winston's "The Human Mind", Suskind's "Perfume", Clive Church's
"The Politics and Government of Switzerland",  and Jonathan Harr's "A Civil Action", all at once.
Recently I finished "Raising Multilingual Children" by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa (the prose is stiff,
but I doubt you'll find better discussion on the subject out of  the journal's circuit) and  Steven Johnson's
"Mind Wide Open" (short and fun, but necessarily superficial).

If you ask me to recommend an author or a book to you, try:
Aldous Huxley  -- Point Counter Point, Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited, Those Barren
                                  Leaves, Chrome Yellow,Time Must Have a Stop, Island, etc.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez  --  Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and
                                                      Other Demons
Isabel Allende  -- Eva Luna, Daughter of Fortune, House of Spirits, Portrait in Sepia, Paula
Salman Rushdie -- Midnight's Children, Haroun and the See of Stories, The Jaguar Smile, The Ground
                                    Beneath Her Feet, The Moor's Last Sigh, Fury
Max Frisch  --  Homo Faber, Man in the Holocene, I'm Not Stiller,  Don Juan or the Love of Geometry
Antoine de Saint Exupery  --  The Little Prince, Southern Mail,  Wind, Sand & Stars, Flight to Arras,
                                                       Night Flight
Naguib Mahfouz  -- The Cairo Trilogy
Jasper Fforde -- The Jane Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots
Milan Kundera  --  Laughable Loves, The Farewell Party, The Book of Laughter and  Forgetting, The
                                   Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance
Hanif Kureishi  --  The Black Album, The Buddha of Suburbia
Haruki Murakami  -- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, "Dance,
                                        Dance, Dance", The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Wild Sheep Chase
Azar Nafisi  -- Reading Lolita in Tehran
Peter Hoeg  --  Borderliners, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Tales of the Night
Umberto Eco  --  The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before
D.H. Lawrence  --  Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Virgin
                                     and the Gypsy, The Lost Girl  (this last one is not as good as the rest)
Ahdaf Soueif   --  Map of Love
Jasper Fforde   -- The Jane Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plot
Matt Ridley -- Genome, The Agile Gene, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
Tracy Kidder -- Mountains Beyond Mountains
Jobling, Hurles, and Tyler-Smith -- Human Evolutionary Genetics: origins, peoples and disease

One of these days, I'm gonna have a family too, but for now I simply enjoy  visiting Roman's sister Manou,
who is only 6 months my senior.