Brief background/experiences
My grandfather was a Japanese-Canadian fisherman/carpenter/boat-builder who kept an amazing vegetable and flower garden, and did all kinds of humble but ingenious and useful renovations and additions on his property. His house and garden formed a perfect place for a young child to explore, and I'm pretty sure it was the summers I spent visiting him that planted a curiosity about architecture in me.

I grew up in a suburban setting in Western Canada (Edmonton, Alberta), however, and not knowing any architects growing up it did not seem like a likely career goal. So I only decided to pursue architecture after a few years of mixed undergrad studies in visual arts, sociology, and biological sciences. I did one year in the undergrad at the McGill University School of Architecture in Montreal, Canada, and in my first semester started auditing an upper-year history course that really interested me. I decided to transfer into McGill's History and Theory of Architecture master's-level program--after all, it was only a year--and ended up enjoying it so much that I am just now finishing a PhD there.

During the five years of my PhD, I've taught a bit, worked as a manuscript editor and an assistant editor for a book series, worked as a grant-writer, organized a conference which grew way larger than we originally imagined, and developed a pretty good tennis game. During my undergrad, I worked in a biochemistry lab. So I have work experience, but none in the “real world.” (I did have a “real-world” office job lined up for this spring and summer, but it fell through last October when the stock market crashed.)

Why you chose your school/program
I think it was the bigness of it all, as Rem might say. I was wowed by the imposing studio space in Gund Hall (even though the facilities at many other schools, including Yale, are much nicer and certainly more comfortable), and was just really excited by the energy of so many creative people working under the same leaky roof. And there are the big names--OMA, H+DeM, SANAA, and so on, and a number of Harvard scholars outside the GSD (mostly in areas related to the history of medicine) whose work I've gotten to know during my PhD and who have become heroes to me. There was also money--I wouldn't call it big, but it's big for me. And the big (long), rigorous, boot-camp approach to the core program. It struck me as a Maximum Architecture School, in the way that they call Mumbai the Maximum City. Boston, as a large and diverse city, also appealed to me as a great introduction to the United States.

Architecture interests
I guess all the garden paths, secret doors, and multiple stairs and passageways that my grandfather built must have gotten to me: I'm fascinated by how we move from place to place and occupy a given space, and how (you could say, in the way that cognitive-science or phenomenology would look at it) these kinds of architectural situations in our immediate, often small-scale, environment help form our experiences. That's really where it's at for me. I find form, materials, and social and political context interesting, of course, but not so much in their own right as to the extent that they relate to this basic condition of how our built spaces allow us different ways to live in our bodies. What this means for a future job in the "real-world," if any, I have no idea.

Other interests
Tennis, running, gardening, gerbils (who have their own architectural ideas), aquariums (freshwater fish and plants), painting and drawing, writing, and reading fiction (Cormac McCarthy, Mark Danielewski, Haruki Murakami).

My PhD dissertation, entitled 'Articulation and the Origins of Proportion in Archaic and Classical Greece,' looks at ancient Greek ideas about craft, politics, and the human body which were formative in early notions and theories of proportion, from Homer to Plato. As I finish my PhD, a future research interest for me is in the relationship between modern ideas about "bodies" in medicine, politics, and architecture (the advent of hygiene, the nation-state, and ideas about how a building should be).