By the time Curran Oi entered middle school, it was evident he would pursue a career in math and science. He liked solving problems.
“And later, I was really into physics,” said Oi, a post-doctoral fellow in the UW Medicine Department Genome Sciences. “You could set up a small problem and solve it. In some ways, I found it cooler than math because it can predict physical behaviors of things around you.”
“Physical behaviors” of a different kind were another passion long before he learned long division and square roots.
“I watched figure skating on TV and started jumping and spinning around the living room,” he said. “I asked my parents to sign me up for lessons at age 5, and it took off from there.”
“Took off” is an understatement. By high school, Oi was competing in the World Junior Figure Skating Championships. He traveled internationally, including to Bulgaria twice, and admits, “it was a big part of my identity in high school.”
In skating, like physics, momentum plays a significant role, representing “mass in motion,” of an object – whether an atom or an 18-year-old from Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was at that age that Oi put aside ice skates and entered MIT. He completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering with a double major in Physics in 2013.
