In this short talk, I will briefly address the development of my mathematical research interests and taste for problems in the last 25 years. I will try to complement this trajectory with my experiences as a gay man in the mathematical sciences during difficult times.

Bio: Rustum Cholsi (he/him) was born into the small Parsi (Zoroastrian) community in Mumbai, India. He and his family emigrated to Montreal when he was two years of age. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in 1989 and went on to complete his Ph.D. at Brown University in 1994. After holding post-doctoral positions at the Center for Nonlinear Analysis, Carnegie Mellon University and the Courant Institute, New York University, he was a faculty member with the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University. Since 2010, he has been a professor at the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at McGill University. He views himself as an applied mathematician, and, broadly speaking, his research lies in the study and application of variational problems.