"I have always loved learning things. I used to go over to my grandparents' house every Friday night for Shabbat dinner. And then I would sleep over. My grandfather was a professor of biochemistry and medical doctor at the University of Toronto. He was a polymath. He loved all topics, including history and music. He was an amazing singer, and we used to play a lot of music. On Saturday mornings he would teach me history and biology and a lot of math. He would often talk to me about things I didn't really understand yet. Once he was trying to teach me trigonometry, and I just ended up writing a bunch of random ‘sins’ and ‘tans’ on a piece of paper. And I asked him, "is this right?" He just said, “no, not at all." I don't think I understood the concept of an angle, which was probably a barrier to doing it correctly. He really loved astronomy, too. I remember we used to go to an inn in northern Ontario every year as a family. He had a huge telescope that he would always bring up. One night, when we were looking out at the moons of Jupiter—we used to try and identify them—and he was trying to convey this idea of infinitude and the expansiveness of the universe, and you know, how insignificant we are in the scope of it. I remember being absolutely awestruck. I couldn't even process that concept, that feeling of being a speck of dust in the universe. I think, in a way that appreciation of our insignificance has affected me. In college I took three electives. Existentialism was one, and yeah, I do think that has influenced my perspective. There’s a general perspective, which I think aligns with this idea of our smallness in the universe, that nothing we do actually matters in the scope of reality. And that doesn't mean that nothing is worth doing. It just means you have to create your own meaning. I love people. I think I got into neuroscience because I wanted to understand myself better and I want to understand people better. The only tool that I have to understand anything is math. And so, I figured this would be the most interesting thing, to apply math to people. I think it brings me meaning to understand people because I feel like I can connect with them better.”