Berk Ustun is waiting for me outside my office. He has the easy demeanor, the affable, open quality of someone who is comfortable in a number of contexts. Later, as our conversation ranges from optimization problems to basketball to the X-Files, my initial sense is confirmed. Ustun – in the way of CRCS postdocs – […]

Melanie F. Pradier joins me via Skype. It’s mid-afternoon in Madrid, the beginning of the work day in Cambridge. Pradier’s enthusiasm – her palpable energy and vivacity when talking about her research – is more invigorating than my cup of coffee. After a few minutes of technical difficulty, we’re off! I’m immediately struck by the […]

I meet George Kellaris at Hi-Rise Bakery, where he waves off my attempts to pay for coffee. Kellaris is a second-year postdoc who divides his time between Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society and the Computer Science program at Boston University. As an undergraduate, Kellaris chose computer science over his other passion – […]