 Hey, I'm Dr. Chatterjee. Welcome to my office hours. Well, Dr. Chatterjee, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I'm definitely looking forward to being able to get to know a little bit more about you outside of academia and outside of your research. So I want to start the conversation by asking you what inspired you to pursue engineering and then ultimately become a professor in engineering. Yeah. So I have always been passionate about the Sun silly studying, like I love reading, getting new knowledge. I love learning new things and I could sit and read and work for hours together. So I kind of knew that I always wanted to be in a profession where there are no boundaries to learning new things. Oh, okay. And guess what? As a professor, you're paid to study, you're paid to learn, you're paid to teach others to be excited about new things. I feel like it's a dream job for me also. Is there any other profession that you would want to pursue or want to do? Yeah, I would be a programmer or a coder. Okay. I would just, you know, I like the fact that, again, coding has that same thing about my personality that I can kind of be anywhere. I can create anything. I like the passion, the intensity that goes with creating something that was never there before. So I think a programmer, coder, nice thing is as a professor I can do all of that. So again, kind of going back to my current profession, but yeah, I think a programmer would be a great alternative. I like doing things in addition to academics. So things that I like doing in tandem is because a lot of my academic work is writing. Most of my work is computational. So whether it's coding or writing papers or writing proposals, a lot of it is writing. So in my free time, I like running, like literally running. So I like, and I don't like just running, I like competing with others. So I have a running growth and I pretty much run about twice a week during the running season. So when you're running, what do you do? Do you just like kind of zone out and just think about different things? Do you listen to podcasts? Is there certain kind of music you like to listen to? When I'm running, I think of these huge things I want to do, like things I want to discover. You know, that doesn't happen because a lot of the times I'm trying to beat other people. Okay. So a few things that I do is I listen to podcasts. So if I'm on my longer run, so I don't just go out and do long runs. I have a lot of respect for people who just had nothing in their ears and just keep running. I get bored. So I need continuous entertainment. I actually just started listening to a podcast. It's from Kozlau Ventures. And I wrote it down. I want to read that book, Shelly Archambau. This podcast name is Instigators of Change, and I love the name. It's like almost made for me, un-pologetically ambitious. That sounds so good. It does. It does. So I want to read that book. So she wrote that book, and I heard about it in Kozlau Ventures. I think they have a new one, so the one before this last one. And the name of the podcast is Instigators of Change. So that's a new podcast that's going to enter my podcast repo. What do you think is one of the biggest challenges that you've ever had to face? I think the days I'm really happy is when I've worked out like crazy. I feel like one of my challenges is, I can't just do nothing. I can't just enjoy doing nothing. I can't just be at leisure. Maybe I don't know if that is a phase in my life, but I feel like that thing where I really have to do stuff every minute of my life. In fact, I even listen to, I do Duolingo. I do French. I'm doing Duolingo right now too. I'm doing Spanish. So my son literally told me, Mama, that's bad for you that every minute you have to do something. I feel like it's almost challenging for me to sit still and do nothing. I find it impossible to just sit still and maybe just chat on the phone or just be like a normal person. I feel like I have something missing in me. I have to be on the go. I have to listen to something. I have to do something. Okay. That's interesting. I'm honestly, I'm the exact opposite. I am perfectly content just sitting, doing nothing. I don't like people bothering me. I can just sit and just exist. So is there anything that you do to kind of combat that? Maybe talking to my mom. Okay. Okay. No, she told me, do you still sing? Do you still write? You know, like I like the dancing parts as a kid. I learned to sing. I learned to dance. I was from a Bengali household. So pretty much taught everything in addition to math, reading, you got to dance, you got to sing, you know, like all of that. So that's typically a typical Bengali household. Okay. So I have my music lessons, music lessons, song lessons, dance lessons, oh my gosh, art lessons, all of that. So I feel like sometimes when I'm like running off to my papers and everything, all those juices, I feel like dry out, but I've still written poetry like the other day I had a deadline and in five minutes I wrote a poem. I'd definitely love to hear a little bit more about when you started writing poetry. So maybe just kind of a little bit more on kind of your process of writing poetry or maybe where you get inspiration from when you write your poetry. So it's funny. My mom is an artist, she can draw stuff because she was all about biology and chemistry. My grandmom studied logic and philosophy, but she could write. She could write very spontaneously. I feel like I got her a gene. I can write like one long page of poetry in like five minutes. It just has to naturally happen to me. If you suddenly tell me, hey, write this, I might be like, I don't know, but if it comes to me, I can just write stuff like really fast. So thank you so much for talking with me this afternoon. I definitely love getting to know a little bit more about you doing your office. Awesome. Thanks Mimi. This was awesome. Yes, it was. Thank you.