Penn Professors on Writing in MEAM
Dr. Prashant Purohit
About the Professor
Dr. Purohit received a B Tech in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, and MS and PhD in Applied Mechanics at the California Institute of Technology. He is currently an Associate Professor at Penn and specializes in the mechanics of materials, biomechanics, and computational mechanics. For the past decade, Dr. Purohit has been exploring the behavior of mechanical processes on single molecules in biophysics and how this can be modeled mathematically.
Personal Writing Process
“Our writing is primarily concerned with writing papers and proposals. The majority of time is spent in writing journal papers, publications which typically overlap with physics in content and style."
“I have a routine. First, whatever models I have I write down and make handwritten notes. When these handwritten notes reach a certain level of maturity, I type them into the computer. Over a period of time, when a developing model has reached a level of sophistication that it can explain previous experiments and generate predictions for new experiments, I write the paper. Everything is laid out clearly, and I go through seven, eight, or ten drafts before I get to the final piece, before submission to a journal.”
OTHER GREAT WRITERS IN MEAM
“One person whose writing I admire is Rob Phillips, who was my first postdoc advisor. He starts with great simplicity yet is able to convey sophisticated ideas in a manner which makes the reader feel he or she is conversing with him. He is, at times, a little rebellious and goes against the grain of things in literature. This makes his prose really interesting to read. In a completely different style, Phil Nelson (in the physics department at Penn and my second postdoc advisor) has a book on biological physics. I admire his style, too, which is more to the point and, at times, humorous. For example, in his book on biological physics, there are two characters who have conversations about concepts and problems, one challenging the other – sometimes one guys wins, and sometimes the other guy wins. Phil explains the subtleties in various mathematical and physical models through those conversations.”
Links
Back to Writing in the Discipline: Mechanical Engineering and Applied MechanicsOther professors in MEAM: Dr. Turner
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