Music, Biology, and Math: An Evolutionary Play in the Ecological Theater

Abstract

How did I get here? I will talk about how my father's serendipitous acceptance of a six-week teaching assistantship at the University of Colorado lead to lead to my growing up in Boulder, Colorado, and how early immersion in an environment full of music, biology, and math (in that order) inspired my early interest in trying to understand the workings of nature (including the humans in it). How an early family tragedy turned my course towards the study of the mathematical and computational sciences and operations research at Stanford, and on to a career at FICO and AT&T Bell Labs. And then returning back to my childhood interest in biology to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with an emphasis on theoretical and computation ecology. It is an evolutionary play in the ecological theater (referring to "The Ecological Theatre and the Evolutionary Play" (1965) by the pioneering theoretical ecologist, George Evelyn Hutchinson). And I will tell you what the combination of music, biology, and math have to do with what I do now as a lead modeling and simulation engineer at MITRE.