Stewart

Newman Smith High School, Rice University, the University of Michigan

Seemingly permanent grad student

Teach for America, Michigan Democratic Party, The Detroit Zoo

Hamlet, moisturizer, nighttime, perl, R, shipwrecks, urban exploration, worst-case scenarios

Adrift, The Art of Teaching, Bush at War, Contact, Desert Solitaire, Mathematical Ideas in Biology, Statistical Methods in Biology, Tao Te Ching

Restoration, Serenity, Three Kings, The Truman Show

The Album Leaf, Coldplay, Deep Forest, Muse, The Octopus Project, Philip Glass, Pineapple Thief, Slowdive, White Stripes, Zero 7

The Daily Show, Globe Trekker, Late Night with Conan O'Brien

I've sometimes thought about getting two tattoos, one on my left shoulder blade of Taiwan and another on my right shoulder blade of Texas. As a first-generation, I find the "Where are you from" question tricky and always want to respond with "What do you mean?". My parents are from Taiwan, and all of my extended family still live there. But in all other respects, save political leaning, I'm from Texas. Childhood in the suburbs of Dallas was good: forts made from sofa cushions, trips to the library on Saturday afternoons with my dad, and hearing the marching band practice early on fall mornings through the screen door. I went to college in Houston, at Rice, where I majored in biochemistry and Latin. It was a great experience, but by the end I was a bit tired of being alone in labs and spent three years afterward teaching, first with Teach for America in rural South Louisiana and then at my old high school. South Louisiana, I'll never forget you. And I loved being home and teaching, but additional schooling called. Now I'm a grad student at the University of Michigan with less than a year left to go in the PhD process. I'm looking at differences in the immune response to infectious disease. (Besides God and luck, why does one person get sick and another stay healthy?) I like it here in Ann Arbor mostly, but I find winter annoying. For more up-to-date information on me, you can check out my blog at stewsblues.blogspot.com.

People I knew and people around, old friends lost and new ones found