Nabarun Dasgupta

first, if anyone else lives in the south, let me know because i am always up for a road trip. i live in chapel hill, north carolina, and the BBQ and fried chicken and hush puppies are damn good. come on down!

props to all with kids and family, but some of us aren't about to grow up anytime soon.

i am writing to you from geneva, switzerland. i am working at the world health organization (WHO) for the summer and using the excuse to binge travel throughout europe. maybe that is not surprising, but the route was anything but planned...

after greely i went off to college and had myself a great time. so great in fact, that i failed out of princeton. i ended up bumming around san diego (it was the furthest away i could get from maine without crossing an ocean), and learned some life lessons from the surfer folk at the baja california beaches. got serious and went back and finished at princeton.

i was looking for something to do after college so i typed into google the things i thought i wanted out of a career: travel international biology infectious diseases outside

thanks to the search engine, i found the public health school at yale. on my frist day of class, i show up and there is JOAN ALTMAN standing there with a big grin on her face. we both got our masters in public health there and became hommies. she lives in DC now and works for the feds.

as part of my masters work, i spent a summer in portland interviewing people with drug abuse problems (and many users without problems) and became very interested in learning about drug use from a public health perspective. i spent a lot of time on the streets talking to people and doing harm reduction interventions. i found something i was really interested in. had to go with it.

after i graduated with my masters i applied to 130 jobs, and got 2 interviews and one offer. all that education and i was broke, so i took the job. i worked for a few years in the pharmaceutical industry learning more about drug abuse and treatment for addiction. cool stuff. i was still living in new haven at the time, on the 3rd floor of a house converted to apartments. one day, we had new neighbors downstairs. turns out that MIKE HEALLY had moved in downstairs from me, eight years later and completely by coincidence. he's lawyering it up in the CT and doing well. we would go off in the mornings, bleary-eyed in our suits and ties, wave to each other.

i worked for a bit longer and got laid off with 75% of my company and decided to go back to school. i was doing some work in rural india at the time and couldn't get to a fast enough internet connection to do my applications online for grad school. luckily UNC had a paper application that i could fill out and send in. it's a fantasitc school and i am now doing a phd in epidemiology (think: epidemics) of drug use. one year down, and who knows how many more to go.

so that's the chronology. it's been a damn fun 10 years. along the way there has been lots of travel and good fortune and great friends. you can still find me in NYC and DC quite frequently. my parents left maine, so i don't make it up there so much any more. but i will trundle up for the reunion. looking forward to seeing y'all and hearing your stories and meeting your kids (none of my own for the forseeable future) and spouses (none of my own for the forseeable future).

cheers,
nab