Given the increasing digitization of our social world, having a website is a necessary tool for young, aspiring academics. It gives colleagues, potential employers, and curious minds, an easily accessible snapshot of who you are, what you do, and why you do it. With the tools available from modern web development kits, it has never been easier to make a beautiful website that embodies aspects of your own personality. Housed within this website, my little digital island in the vast ocean of digital space, is my curriculum vitae, a brief bio, as well as a selection of photographs from some of the things I've done and seen, a journal which I occasionally update, and more. Linked at the bottom are my social media profiles if you are curious to know more. Please explore my little island at your leisure, and if anything sparks your interest, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Enjoy.
If you have the means and wish to support a Ph.D. student in his journey, please consider making a donation. These funds will be used to help sustain my life and keep me going in my pursuits and international conference leadership and attendance, as Ph.D. funding is minimal and Toronto is expensive! 1.5% goes to Stripe Climate, which sends the money to decarbonization projects selected by Frontier. Thank you very much for considering this.
Here is something personal.
These are the words of Carl Sagan, along with the image from the Voyager spacecraft taken on February 14, 1990 -- which he pushed NASA to take -- to which he refers. The small blueish dot you see within the red beam of this background image is Earth from just past six-billion kilometres. This quote, from Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, is a personal favourite of mine. Read and reflect on these words, for they are timeless and moving. They form the basis of my worldview.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
