I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a research fellow in the Ingber Lab at Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital Boston. I was last a postdoc in the Self-Organizing Systems Research group at Harvard. My research, described in more detail elsewhere, is in swarm robotics, evolutionary theory, and in general the design and understanding of complex emergent systems.

I did my Ph.D. at MIT, as a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (formerly the lamented AI Lab), and of a lab full of physicists in the neuroscience department. Before that, I was an undergraduate at Princeton, where I majored in physics and minored in biophysics, applied math, computer science, and engineering physics.

In grad school, I sang a cappella with Techiya for four years, with a year each as president and music director. See photos of the recording session for our first-ever CD, Half-Life. It's a very clever name, trust me.

Vladimir Bulovic taught a course on mime during IAP 2001; and my God, what an underrated and unfairly maligned art form it turns out to be. Mime is not scary people in leotards pretending to be trapped in invisible boxes in parks; rather, it's theater that takes place not on stage but in the minds of the audience; it's storytelling without words, props, costumes, or sets, where the performer's only tool is movement. We and others quickly formed the student group MIMEtype; at one point I found I had become the president, which I'm pleased to say is no longer the case. I similarly found myself teaching the workshop for IAP 2004, when Vladimir was off in California not experiencing our 25-below-zero weather. And after a period of inactivity due to the perhaps predictable membership problems, the club is once again active and vibrant. Oh wait, it's inactive again.

I was vice-president of Edgerton House for two years. The best thing about the position was the ability to force everyone to read my poetry. Our officer team won the first ever "Legacy Award" in 2001.

I was one of the three active members of the Graduate Ring committee in 2003-2004, the year of the first real redesign, new manufacturer contract, and huge publicity push to try to make people aware of the fact that there actually is a graduate ring. Extensive and uphill battle it may have been, but we have a terrific new design. Yeah, that's a slice of pizza he's holding. You wanna make something of it?

I was named an MIT Arts Scholar for 2004.

I became involved particularly with the early days of the MIT student juggling club, Aero-Disastro.

In college, I was part of the Princeton University Band, where I was in the trash section. Mostly I was a juggler, unicyclist, and formation prop guy (although I played glockenspiel during my final spring; and there was one memorable semester where I made a point of playing every instrument in the band at at least one game, not necessarily very well). You may ask (as many did), why did I keep doing it if I didn't play a normal band instrument and hated watching sports? It was all about the people: the Band was consistently the place to find the most interesting, nicest, all-around greatest group of people at the school. One fall I was the announcer, which gave me the opportunity to read two shows over the PA system at Giants Stadium. I also helped write many of the pregame and halftime shows, and was responsible for the All-Quantum-Mechanics Pregame Show at Penn.

I was a member of the Triangle Club, Princeton's 100+-year-old original musical theater group. I was on stage in four shows, including The Tiger Roars, commissioned for the University's 250th anniversary; went on cross-country tour with the latter show; and wrote various songs and skits for the club.

I was in the Juggling Club for four years, and president for three of those.

As secretary of Infinity, Ltd., the science fiction club, I helped bring authors Frederik Pohl and Stephen Donaldson to come speak on campus.

I was a contributor to Distractions, the campus puzzle magazine. Some of my puzzles are still online.

Way back in high school, my big thing was Odyssey of the Mind, an international problem-solving competition; I competed for four years (in the problems Delayed Reaction, Dinosaurs, Mini-Terrain Vehicles, and The Mail Must Go Through, for those keeping track) with a team that went to the World Finals twice (placing seventh one of those times), and was president of the school chapter. There was also the computer team (ACSL national finals four years, president) and It's Academic (high school version of College Bowl, televised in the Washington, D.C. area; various local to national competitions, by far the best of which was the Panasonic Academic Challenge, held in Disneyworld with great questions and huge huge prizes).

My Erdös number and Kevin Bacon number are both 4.

In juggling, again my thing is breadth rather than depth. In the summer of 2001, at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, I got to do two things I'd wanted to do for years: juggle in a circus (albeit a very small one), and go mountain unicycling. More details and pictures of both here. I built a telescoping four-to-ten-foot unicycle one IAP and thereafter, in a modular bicycle workshop run by Saul Griffith and Eric Wilhelm at the Media Lab and with Saul's later help; and I engage in the occasional unicycle joust. Recently I got a Coker for faster commuting. In the summer of 2003 I taught classes in unicycling, diabolo, and devil sticks at Somerville's Open Air Circus; this winter I'll be teaching MIT's PE class on juggling.

My instruments are piano, harmonica, and musical saw. I've done some fencing at MIT (learning with both hands, so I can do the Princess Bride thing if necessary); learned to sail, but to my surprise and disappointment found it neither fun nor relaxing; got into stunt kiting instead, which is both; and have done some blacksmithing through the Materials Science & Engineering department (photos of my first project here). Since about my last year of grad school, my main activity of note has been glassblowing.

I like words. I write fiction, and occasionally it gets published in kind magazines. The elegant use of language is also a large part of what I enjoy about storytelling, which I keep trying to get back into on an active basis. (Most recently I performed at Club Passim in Harvard Square, along with the legendary Brother Blue.) And there are the occasional skits and lyric rewrites, and the beauty I find in elaborate puns.

If you missed the oratorio performance of David Bass's remarkable Space Opera at MIT in February 2002, you missed out. As the name almost implies, it's a full-length original opera based on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope; and yet it's amazingly good. And though we may not have done it full justice, it was amazingly fun. One of the cast members has 83 photos of the performance online. Recordings! Act 1, Act 2. Descriptions of the individual tracks can be found here. Contact me if you want to talk about getting a physical CD copy with cool jewel-case inserts.

As the previous item might have led you to guess, I'm a big fan of Star Wars, George Lucas's sweeping and increasingly clunky epic series that redefined the science fiction film genre and changed the face of popular culture. I'm at least as much into the Muppets and Jim Henson's other works; I have a lot of respect for Jim Henson's way of operating, style of humor, and goal of reshaping puppetry to be more than children's entertainment in the American eye (despite the backward steps in that regard taken by his company since his death in 1990). Other institutions I especially like include Cirque du Soleil and Wallace and Gromit.

One of my favorite authors is Neil Gaiman. He's best known for the Sandman series of graphic novels -- which are largely overrated, though they get spectacularly good by the last couple of collected volumes. The problem is that in the comic format, nearly all prose besides dialogue (good though that may be) is lost; and Gaiman's incredible strength is in the use of language. I dream of being a storyteller like this man. Read his novels.

I was brought up on 1950s-era Peanuts collections, and have loved comic strips all my life (and read entirely, entirely too many of them). Two of the best online are Sluggy Freelance (one of the first and still among the best, hilarious and gripping by turns, sometimes simultaneously; it's very much serial, so if this is your introduction to it, it's crucial to start at the beginning) and Piled Higher and Deeper (unspeakably funny if you're a grad student and you know it's all true); of those currently in syndication, two at the top are FoxTrot (mainstream family setting with surprisingly sophisticated geek humor for a newspaper strip, and great hidden jokes) and Big Nate (terrific characters and interplay between them); all of these have been consistently creative and clever over many years of being drawn.

Back	Justin also occasionally enjoys pretentiously referring to himself in the third person.