By professional training, I am a teacher and mathematician. I obtained my PhD from the University of California (Berkeley), specializing in low-dimensional and differential topology. In particular, I took courses on immersion theory, knots, links, 3- and 4-dimensional spaces, Riemann surfaces, dynamical systems, twistor theory, singularity theory in general relativity, differential equations, and algebraic topology, among other subjects, and was involved with courses and seminars taught or run by Smale, Pugh, Singer, Wu, Kirby, Chern, Harrison, among others. I have published in a number of journals, including Inventiones Math, and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and have given mathematical seminars at many academic institutions, including UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, and Caltech.