My name is Jalel Sager, I'm a native of Lansing, Michigan. So I'm, a transplant here in sunny California. Usually we get a good view of the skyline.

Nowadays, I'm pretty much mediocre at everything. Short! Except for, you know, hopefully taking care of my kids most days. Count it!

Learning for me is something that's just like breathing in a way which I think, you know, is part of who I am - but also, I have to sometimes realize that to really, truly learn something, I have to focus. I think the easiest hobby for me to get to is, is gardening, because it's right outside my office door.

For me it's mostly just a process of uncovering because there's so much here already. If I leave the yard as I did through April, I have to come out and carve paths through these things. I think this year I'm just going to go kind of see what - see what comes, and let the color kind of take over. I've cataloged something like 35 species back here, so we've been really careful to kind of make the garden a good habitat.

I'm a person who's really driven by kind of an insatiable desire to know how things work. So for the maybe ten years before I went back to get my PhD I, wrote novels - it was a hard way to make a living, so I started doing nonfiction writing as a ghost writer.

Golf balls, home improvement, you name it, I would do it. But eventually I decided what I was really interested in was the environment. 

That was around teh time I moved from rural Kentucky to Hanoi, Vietnam. I actually started putting some of my, my writing skills to use and built an organization there called the Vietnam Green Building Council. Over the years, I transitioned into academia. So I currently work as a professor at the University of San Francisco.

There's this balance between the need for expertise, but the need for people to be asking the naive questions that can drive things forward.

I get a ense of fulfillment myself in that connection, I think I benefit as much as they do. The students we teach in the graduate program, Energy Systens Management, they come for the most part because they want to have a career in a field where they can affect positive change. 

We give them the practical skills they need to understand the energy world. But also, we try to nurture that side of them that wants to help, that wants to be useful, that wants to be part of something larger than themselves, which is, I think lacking these days.