Miscellaneous

• My legal name is John, but everyone’s always called me Jack. (This confuses enough people that I thought it worth mentioning here.)

• In a past life, I was an avid geocacher, and want to eventually find a geocache in all 50 US states. Over the summer of 2023, I drove across the country twice and managed to snag geocaches in quite a few of the more obscure states.

• I have a lot of interests outside of research. I enjoy practicing different forms of exercise (running, weightlifting, playing basketball, occasional yoga) and making (mediocre) music. I also spend a lot of time with my wonderful group of friends, who I am very grateful for. :)

Books

I’m a pretty avid reader. Here’s a list of books that I enjoyed or moved me in some significant way:

• Barbarian Days (William Finnegan)

• All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

• The Brief And Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)

• The Elephant Vanishes (Haruki Murakami)

• Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens)

• Moonwalking With Einstein (Joshua Foer)

• As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)

• Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey)

• A Murder Is Announced (Agatha Christie)

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt)

• The Happiness Hypothesis (Jonathan Haidt)

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin)

• Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace)

• Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)