Moving again, again

Things of great mass do not like to be jerked around, and when a great force comes, a lot of stresses develop and cracks form and propagate. Steel doesn't feel pain(?) but I definitely did and still do. These events are perceived through the lens of my mental state, which at the moment, is tuned to see negativity more than anything else. While I objectively know what I am writing are factually good things that I consciously want, it is hard for me to feel that "goodness" amidst the hurdles I have to jump to get them.

Following my acceptance of the job offer at Imperial, many things had to change and fast, and I did my very best to make sure these changes do not have adverse effects on my personal life or my research group. In doing so, I believe that I have wrecked my brain and body over these months. This shouldn't really come as a surprise. I wrote about this almost exact thing 5 years ago when I first moved to Houston.

I will first do a chronological account of the past year. This follows the article on getting and accepting the Imperial College job back in August 2025. The subsequent year (August 2025 to 2026, now) is also the one where I planned to assemble and submit my tenure case. So I still did all of the things I planned to do, short of actually putting it together as a package. All of this commingled together.

I received a contract from DoD to develop an autonomous detection and deposition algorithm for additive manufacturing. This began my serious use of AI/LLM for coding (first ChatGPT then Claude). We executed the deliverables for year 1 of the project before passing it to another PI at Houston for year 2. I would say that year 1 went well, us having demonstrated the algorithm live at a factory site. I started realizing the code Claude wrote, it would have taken me much longer, and I would not dare assigning it to an engineering PhD student.

We began to put the house on the market at the start of March. This led us to live as if we are in a hostel, having to cart our toiletries in and out of the drawer every morning and evening. The factual details of this is in another post. We felt that our space was being invaded constantly and massively, with the house being staged and personal effects taken away, and visitors coming with little announcement. The house eventually sold and quickly too, but it also meant that we had to stay with friends for a month (April to May), all of our things either sold or in their garage and then a moving box. This moving box is still in the middle of a fucking ocean! To conclude that saga, I was told ever since I was young that buying real estate was a good thing, stability and all that. After this experience (the buying, owning and selling), I don't think I will ever buy again. I hated the entire process and the notion of stability, and factually made much more money over the same time span on the stock market.

The reviews for three major papers came back almost simultaneously (Dec 25 / Jan 26), two had two reviewers, one had four. You can read about them at aimlab.uk. This started a revision process that led to about 100 pages of rebuttal and revision (these are public). Only a couple of weeks ago did the last of the three papers go online. I am proud of each one of them, and the students behind all the work. They were a culmination of some research goals I proposed at my job talk in 2021 and what I would have put into my tenure package.

I gave a talk at GRC Multifunctional materials in Jan 2026 and got some laughs with a horrible joke about the size of Greenland and how it appears much larger on a flat map than in reality. Little did I know, UN would propose to re-map the Earth to account for just that.

A protracted NSF proposal award process that led to a Nature writer trying to get a quote from us on how we felt about the delays for a news piece. We eventually did receive the NOA (thanks to the persistence of everyone involved from NSF and our team) as I was moving. The scramble to figure out what to do with my portion of the grant is still on-going. It is based on a research idea that I enjoy very much.

I received my green card in October 2025 after 3 to 4 years of waiting, thousands of dollars, hundreds of pages of compiled document, obtaining 6 reference letters and just as many jabs of vaccinations. All after I don't really need it anymore.

I got a hair transplant in April 2025, in Tijuana, Mexico of all places! That was a fun experience involving a mid-operation earthquake, an accompanying Instagram reel and my swollen head. I will write about that in another piece later.

A large part of our decision to move, and much of the ensuing stress, stem from the wider atmosphere for researchers in Texas and in the US. The laughter about Greenland was because Trump at that time was all gung-ho about buying it. The delay in NSF was almost certainly due to one of the PIs being at Harvard. I anticipate to receive fewer applicants from China, and was not sure if I could continue my research program. Texas made ordinary things quite difficult, things like travelling out of the country, or purchasing consumables. All the communique and rhetorics about sanitizing our curriculum.

Just like the green card, tenure would have probably come. At some point in the 5 years in Houston, there were moments when I dream of tenure. Yet when it was just within grasp, I let go of it. I don't know if I have a fear of stability or a gluttony for punishment. I built a lab, I am building another lab. I am in a new place needing to prove myself again.

Having read the melancholic piece I just wrote, it would appear as if everything was basically positive, and that is true. I felt a lot of anger when I first started writing this piece. It has been sitting in my draft for months. Now that anger is partly displaced by a sense of defeat, nihilism and acceptance.

We always try really hard to achieve what we want. We just forget sometimes that in doing so, we drain our reserve of (something), and sometimes we lose track of what it is that we actually want. I was listening to "Non-stop" from the soundtrack of Hamilton non-stop as a source of motivation. Though, we all know what happened to him even before the duel. At various times in the preceding year, I lost track of why I got into research in the first place, I lost the ability to experience and celebrate joy, I cried and didn't know how to process the emotion, I couldn't breath and felt sore all over, I felt isolated and alone, and didn't even want to go skating (something I did twice a week for years with a group of folks who had no idea what I did for a living).

I started at Imperial officially in the summer of 2026. Though the whole summer was punctuated with travels, battling with the innumerable issues with our (still half empty) flat, and stifling heat with no AC. I was at USNCTAM in pasadena, where I went around and told everyone that I recently moved. I hung out with friends. I went to Leuven, Belgium to attend a conference, by train through the English channel. I met new people and reconnected with some European folks. I was in Houston to attend and celebrate the graduation of my first PhD student. I visited ETH Zurich to attend a PhD defense and to chat with my advisor (for the first time in many years). My colleagues at the Aero Dept are nothing if not the most supportive folks. We bought memberships to a little place across from our flat, the British museum. It is Sept 2026, and we feel more settled.