Vijay PandeInterview
Stanford professor, director of Folding@home
Adapted from Vijay Pande's interview on Uses This, published 3 October 2011. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
Currently it's a late 2009 17" MacBook Pro with a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
My phone is a 32GB iPhone 4.
This drains the battery pretty heavily, but I'm happy that I rarely drain it completely and it holds up much better than my previous iPhone 3G.
I also use a 64GB iPad 2 daily, usually at home in the early morning and late evening to read email and keep track of various web sites.
Communication
I use it heavily during the day writing emails and keeping track of pending issues and often doing video Skype calls.
Productivity
I use Word 2011 pretty heavily, since a lot of my work involves writing or editing papers and grant proposals.
I also give a lot of presentations and use Keynote '09 (looking forward to upgrading that too).
I find Keynote much more elegant to use than Powerpoint as well as faster and more responsive, which is important for fast editing which I frequently do.
Notes
I use Evernote pretty heavily for just about everything, from todo lists to notes, to shopping lists.
Other
I'm a professor of Chemistry, Structural Biology, and Computer Science at Stanford University and Director of its Biophysics Program, but I'm perhaps best known as the Director of the Folding@home Distributed Computing project.
I'm using OS X 10.6.8, but waiting for 10.7.2 to come out to upgrade the OS.
The Papers app is also a fundamental part of my day, helping organize scientific journal articles, which otherwise would be a major mess.