Sunday, March 1, 2009

Meet the team: Anand

Anand Patil
Anand was born in Detroit and got bitten by the travel bug when he went to college on the West coast. Since then he has climbed rocks all over the US, worked at the University of Alaska museum, hiked in the Himalayas, ridden a bike around Pinar del Rio province in Cuba and researched sickle cell disease in the Adivasi community as a volunteer at the Bhasha Research and Education Centre in Gujarat, India, among other travels. He pursued a childhood dream and studied physics as an undergraduate, but eventually realized that physicists don't actually get to go to the big bang and did his doctoral research on advanced statistical methods for inferring the processes driving ecological systems. He nominally enjoys playing the ukulele and banjo, outdoor activities and tinkering, but these days he spends much of his free time at the pub, because he lives in England.

Hometown: Detroit, MI
Current Location: Oxford, UK
Job: Postdoc Map-maker
Mongol Rally job: The Team’s keen sense of direction.
Countries visited: Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, Alaska, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Kenya, Nepal, India, not counting airports.
Languages attempted to have spoken: Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi
Where you will pretend to be from when you get tired of answering questions about America: Alaska
Instruments attempted to have learned: Piano, Banjo, Ukulele
Ukulele song most excited to learn: "Papa Don't Preach"
Country you're most excited about: Tajikistan
If you were a car part, what would you be? If I were a bike part I'd be the Star Fangled Nut... on a car, I guess the timing belt.

1 comment:

andrew said...

I love that you counted Alaska as a country twice in this.