Five years, one dissertation, and a defense I will never forget. Here’s what I actually want to say about it.

Let me be honest with you: when I started this PhD, I had no idea what I was getting into. I knew physics. I knew I loved the way equations could describe invisible things — heat, light, the frantic dance of electrons inside a tiny piece of metal. What I didn’t know was how much this journey would be about becoming someone, not just learning something.

After five years at Rice University, I successfully defended my dissertation. The full title is a mouthful — Coupled Energy Dynamics across Scales: Resonant and Inverted Energy Transfer from Microfluidic to Nanoscale Systems — but here’s the human version:

I spent years asking: can the same ideas that explain how a warm cup of coffee loses heat also explain what’s happening inside a nanoparticle when a laser hits it for a millionth of a billionth of a second? Turns out — yes. Kind of beautifully, yes. I built a tiny “thermal oscillator” that stores heat like a battery and releases it on command. And I predicted a weird, counter-intuitive effect where the atoms in a metal get hotter than the electrons exciting them — which sounds wrong, but is real, and nobody had explained it quite this way before.

The research is cool. But that’s not really what this post is about.

The person who made it possible

I wouldn’t have survived this without my advisor, Prof. Alessandro Alabastri. Not just academically — though his scientific instincts are genuinely sharp — but as a human being who kept reminding me that physics isn’t everything. He’s the one who told me, more than once, that going to the gym matters. That sleep matters. That having a life outside the lab isn’t weakness, it’s the whole point. Coming from a hyper-competitive background where grinding was the only mode I knew, that lesson took a while to land. But it did.

He also had this rare ability to let me be wrong — not by ignoring it, but by walking with me through the wrongness until I found my own way back. I’m a better thinker because of it.

THE COMMITTEE WHO CHALLENGED ME

These four sat in a room and grilled me on my own research. It sounds terrifying — it was, a little — but there’s something weirdly special about being held accountable by people who know more than you and actually care whether you get it right. Prof. Kaden’s questions in particular had a way of making me realize there were layers I hadn’t looked at. That’s a gift, even when it doesn’t feel like one in the moment.

LIFE OUTSIDE THE LAB

Outside the lab, I stayed active — sports kept me grounded when the research felt like it was going nowhere. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of routine that reminds you there’s a world beyond your desk. It helped.

And the defense itself? It went well. I felt prepared. Relieved afterward, mostly.

If I’m being honest, the moment after you defend isn’t the movie version. Nobody hands you a trophy. The committee says congratulations, you shake some hands, and then you’re standing in a hallway thinking — okay, that’s done. It feels quieter than you expect. Not bad. Just… normal. Which, after five years of waiting for it, is its own kind of strange.

“Life is but footprints of a flying goose upon the snow.”

— Su Shi · epigraph I chose for the opening of my thesis

I put that line at the front of my dissertation because it’s honest about impermanence — all the late nights, the failed simulations, the small wins — they leave a mark, but the goose keeps moving. You don’t stop at the footprint. That’s still how it feels now. One chapter closed, not much fanfare, just the quiet sense of forward motion.