Where in Atlanta do you live and what do you like to do?
Jay: Before the pandemic, we lived 50% in Chapel Hill and 50% in Atlanta.  Since then, we live 95% in Chapel Hill. In Atlanta, we live right in the center of town. We take the train and walk to lots of places. When we drive, it's to go to a good restaurant.

Tyler: When in Atlanta, our favorite part to visit is any good restaurant that is coming on the scene. We will travel to good restaurants. As an example, we love a bagel place far north… far OTP [(outside the perimeter)]. It's in a rural area and is clearly a northeast transplant.

Why did you choose AA as your synagogue?
Jay: I was with a different synagogue, but, over time, it was going in a different spiritual direction than what I was looking for. AA reminded me of the shul I grew up in (conservative), and it felt more like what I was looking for/what I grew up with. The services are very familiar. The tunes were modern but in keeping with what I was looking for. It is also SO close to where we were living. Now it feels like home religiously and socially.

What's your 9–5 and 5–9 life?
Jay: 9–5: I actually work in Philadelphia. I "travel" there virtually every day but also physically travel there at times. I trained as an emergency medical physician as part of Thomas Jefferson University/Jefferson Health, and my job title is CMIO, Chief Medical Information Officer. If it's a technology used to deliver anything to patients, that's my purview. 5–9: We have two beagles. They are a handful.

Tyler: I am an academic… Academics famously don't have off switches, so my 9–5 and 5–9 look the same! I am a Professor of English at the University of NC Chapel Hill. I tell time based on when I should be in front of a class of kids. I have a computer science and computer engineering background but moved to the humanities. I am now in the digital humanities field, and my interest in computers comes through in my teaching… science fiction in particular.

Is what you're doing now what you always wanted to do growing up?
Jay: Medicine, yes. Informatics, I stumbled into and married together with medicine. At the time that I started, this was nascent. It was hard to describe to graduate programs that I wanted to do medical informatics. It didn't really exist that way. My pre-med advisor said "If you don't get into medical school what are going to do with a bio degree? Do you want to teach high school? What are you good at?" That's how I wound up doing information tech on the medical side.

Tyler: Yes. I knew at 13 that I wanted to be an English professor. I was really good at math and science. It was the 1980s, and I was offered a scholarship to study computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, which was really important to my working-class family—It helped set my path even though it wasn't traditional.

What's one fact about you that people would be surprised to find out?
Jay: People look at my last name and say "You're Jewish?" I speak fluent French but taught myself. As a project, I learned Yiddish.

Tyler: I was born and raised in the West. I was born in Albuquerque and grew up in Colorado. I miss the West—Its landscape and people are very different from the east coast. My family is all out west—My brother is a filmmaker in Hollywood, and my sister lives in the mountains outside Denver.

What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Jay: You don't have to take the same cow path that everybody else is taking. Everyone that was pre-med was in biology or chemistry, and I just did the bare minimum in those. For pre-med, I studied what I was interested in and what I succeeded in. Do what you enjoy.

Do you have a favorite charity that you wish people knew more about?
Jay: Ahavath Achim!

Tyler: We both give to the Beagle Triangle Rescue. We both give generously to the Bread Loaf School of English (started by Robert Frost)—It only opens during summers, usually teaching other teachers during the summer.