A day in the life at Gang lab

A day in the life at Gang lab

I’m grateful to the Work Exemption Program for enabing me to continue working with the Gang Lab for my Spring 2025 semester at Columbia. As a part of my reflection project, I will be writing a series of blog posts detailing my career, research, and personal life lessons I’ve learned during my time here.

The other blog posts are here:

• Poetic naturalism and the pursuit of truth
• How MOSES paints with symmetries
• Object permanence, powerlessness, and the mystery of the night sky

I wanted to start by describing a typical day in the life in the Gang lab ChemE offices. We’re housed in the third floor of Mudd in the Engineering Terrace. It’s a cozy, fluorescently lit space with office cubicles—the kind of place where people stay home if they want to get actual work done.

Appropriating Ghanim’s desk

I started working the lab offices a week before classes started this semester. I plopped down at the desk of our lab’s resident traveller, Ghanim, who is all the way in the United Arab Emirates for the foreseeable future.

In my time here, I’ve settled into a kind of daily rhythm of Gang Lab.

Schedule-agnostic mornings

A beautiful thing about research is that your daily work is, for the most part, a schedule-agnostic job. With the exception of a few morning people, the lab day usually starts around 12:00pm. People drop off their stuff, start their experiments, then chill out for a bit before the mass exodus to lab group lunch ~1:00pm.

Group lunch

I squeezed myself into the little crew of people who eat lunch together. These guys are like a quarter-generation older than me, so their conversation topics range from lab politics, to real world politics, to ‘being a boomer’.

To fully capture the colorful character of these lunches however, I want to introduce two especially colorful such characters: Dan McKeen and Elad Arad.

Dan McKeen

Dan McKeen is the resident martyr of this crew, equipped with a stock of “McKeenisms” (his self-coined term) which he draws from to react to people. His McKeenisms include:

• “Blatantly disrespectful”
• “Nominally, ….”
• “That’s messed up”
• “It’s cheeewwwsday innit”
• “What the flip bro”

Dan tells people that whenever two disjoint groups of his friends collide, they are able to find common ground in bullying him. (I find it not particularly difficult to see why.)

Elad Arad

Elad Arad is his FOIL. They stand at seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum, in politics and personality, yet they always seem to find themselves together: sitting at lunch together, conducting experiments at Brookhaven together, picking up pizza for group parties together together.

Dan and Elad collide: Dan’s mother

One day, Elad, Dan and I were walking back from grabbing lunch when the topic of Dan’s mother came up. I can’t recall why in hindsight, but we started joking around about how we’re very close with her. Dan asked to prove it, saying that we probably don’t even know her name - to which I came up with “Amanda” on the spot.

Her name was not Amanda of course, but I was quite moved by how much Elad really took to this joke. Though I only realized the extent to which he did when two weeks after this conversation, Elad asked Dan “How’s Amanda?” (To which Dan groaned.)

Lab conversations

I end up chit-chatting a lot with the people inside our office as well.

Raghavendra Nimiwal

Among them, I sit right behind Raghavendra Nimiwal, a ChemE PhD. candidate in both Kyle Bishop and Sanat Kumar’s lab. He’s an avid science geek and crypto trader, with Chris McCandless fantasies of living off the land in a farm in the mountains when he graduates.

We initially bonded over Obsidian, a note-taking application, and how we organize our folders. Eventually our conversations wandered into the philosophical, as I shared the various life lessons I learned over winter break, from my month of isolation in the North Dakotan tundra.

I shared this video with the lab, and we collectively agreed that Raghav is the human reincarnation of this penguin.

Dinner at Shake Shack

One day after a long night of research, Dan, Elad, Raghav and I went to Shake Shack for dinner. We picked up a kid’s menu, which came equipped with a coloring page of various fruits, and four crayons.

To pass the time, I started coloring the french fries yellow. To my frustration, Dan started coloring the strawberry blue. At which point Elad joined in and started coloring the watermelon rind red. I tried maintaining some level of realism by coloring the burger bun yellow, but my aspirations were quickly shut down as Dan swept in to color the patty blue.

It was an awful coloring job.

Yet in that moment, it was just four adults coloring a children’s coloring page horribly — free from pretense, deadlines, and funding cuts. We laughed about it as we were walking back to the lab, and we hung up the page on our lab door.