I became a theorist because I enjoy the curiosity that is inherent in investigating when something unexpected happens…and because I am bad at experiments. My undergraduate studies were in electronics and communication engineering. I took a lot of physics classes, and I found them very interesting, and I decided to switch directions for my graduate work. I pursued a PhD in theoretical physics because it gives me the opportunity to work to understand things in my own way and because the field is really interesting. I just enjoy doing the work. One of the reasons that I work in strongly correlated systems is because the problems are very complicated. First, although we have some methods to “derive” the effective model by fitting experimental data, we don’t know if the Hamiltonian that we have describes this model. It is very, very hard in a strongly correlated system to determine a Hamiltonian for a specific model. Second, even if we know the Hamiltonian, it is still extremely difficult to solve the problem. You can either guess a solution by physical insight, or you should find a simplified model which could capture the essential physics and at the same time would be easier to solve. One of my motivations for doing research is to understand things in my own way. When you read books about physics, you are able to understand things by following the logic of the author. But when you are doing research, you need to discover your own way to understand things and even derive new physics. That’s one of the most interesting parts of research. One of my favorite parts of my work is interpreting things in new ways—in my own way.