I’m a Canadian, born in Ontario. I studied mathematics in school, starting with my bachelors degree at the University of Ottawa. For one year after, I tried applying mathematics to psychology but went back to pure mathematics to get my masters and PhD at McGill University, finishing that in 2016.
After getting my PhD, I studied for two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia. At that point I discovered birds and bird photography and I got hooked into that. Meanwhile, I wasn’t completely happy with the way things worked at universities and how research was conducted. If you’re interested, you can read an article I wrote about that.
Still, after my postdoctoral fellowship, I got a job in research mathematics outside of academia. It was a nice place to work with nice people, but at that point my interest in doing modern research or applying math wasn’t very interesting to me. That was especially true since the sort of work available seemed to me to be about supporting a global capitalism that was far away from appreciating nature.
Eventually, I managed to get a really cool job writing at Photography Life, and I finally managed to quit my math job in 2023. I was a lot happier and since then I much prefer talking about birds and bird photography instead of doing technical work that I personally found very meaningless.
My currents plans are just to keep doing what I’m doing and see where it leads!