Joseph Babcock

Name:    Joseph Babcock            Program:  CMM                Lab:  Min Li, PhD

Hometown:  Chapel Hill, NC        Previous Colleges Attended: Duke University

    While I began life in Baton Rouge, Louisanna, my formative years were spent in the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut. Here, living in a 200 year old Colonial house, I was homeschooled during the 2nd-8th grades before attending public high school with my twin brother. These two factors – my unorthodox education and genetic doppelganger – have had a profound influence on my worldview and personal development. On one hand, learning outside a traditional classroom made me appreciate alternative didactic opportunities,  both during high school and later, in the laboratory setting. Indeed, I believe education happens everywhere, and limiting oneself to learning in one context will exclude many valuable insights. Similarly, my attempts to distinguish myself as an individual despite physical similarities to my twin encouraged my independent mindset. While my brother and I may share a genetic code, we have vastly different aesthetic and philosophical outlooks, an illustration that nature and nurture cannot alone account for the complex tapestry woven by genetic strands.
    It’s not always easy, though, to be so independent, and much of my high school and college years were spent finding ways to perserve my individuality without excluding myself from the normative fold, a social balancing act that proved frequently challenging. By learning to use my unique perspective as a point of engagement rather than dissociation from my peer, I appreciate the need to inclusively celebrate difference in others and onself. Outside social interactions, this individuality has shaped my academic work: in college, I believe course prerequisites to be a convenient fiction, and continue to trust that anything can be learned given sufficient effort. Disciplinary barriers are entirely mental, and if you apply yourself any field is open to investigation.
    Like  my diverse research interests, encompassing bioinformatics, chemical biology, and basic neuroscience, my passions outside the laboratory are numerous: collecting east asian art, writing book reviews, watching an endless stream of subtitled films, perusing international news, and enjoying musical performances at the Myerhoff Symphony Hall. I think balance between work and leisure is essential, and that research is far more productive if it becomes a part of a larger, continual program of intellectual activity. In short, the key to original thought is to always keep the light bulb on, even if your desk lamp is dark.