Cezar Giosan

I was born in the North of Romania in a fantastic small town hidden in mountains and surrounded by lakes and rivers. When I meet people from other countries I like to tell them that I was born in Transylvania, Dracula's country, which is actually not true... I began to be interested in science from secondary school when I accidentally came across some easy books on the relativity theory. I was so fascinated with the ideas that light can curve near gravitational masses, that time can be contracted or dilated as a function of velocity, etc., that I decided to attend a theoretic high school majoring in mathematics and physics. At the same time, however, I realized that we would never be able to understand what matter, space, and time were, until we would understand how our minds worked. Consequently, I started reading philosophy, hoping that I would find some answers in that discipline. Although I found philosophy very interesting and challenging, I soon realized that it only raised questions, admittedly very good ones, but failed to deliver good answers. So, I turned to psychology, with the hope that analyzing major philosophical questions, like the Mind-Body problem, with scientific methods, would prove helpful in bringing some objectivity to the answers I was looking for. And my feeling was that it did. This existential battle happened while in high school.. During that time, I became well familiarized with Freud's psychoanalysis, being for many years its fanatic supporter. It was very late, after embracing some of Karl Popper's ideas, when I realized that psychoanalysis was far from being a science, as I understood it.

After high school I went for one year in the mandatory Romanian Army, which I greatly enjoyed. University degree programs in psychology had been abolished during the Communist era because they were considered a threat to the communist regime, so in 1989 I entered a B.S./M.S. program at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, which I graduated in 1994, getting an M.S. in mechanical engineering. As soon as I got the degree, I became an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of Bucharest. This was soon after the Revolution, when academic programs in psychology were reestablished. I hurried and finished the program in three years, Magna Cum Laude (1994-1997) and I was subsequently admitted as a doctoral student in organizational psychology at the University of Bucharest. In parallel, I started working as a teacher, and then as a human resources manager in a private marketing company based in Bucharest. Working in human resources made me discover new horizons, as I realized that I could get much satisfaction in nonacademic settings, which I had never believed before. Since then, I have always oscillated between pursuing an academic career and a career in industry.

I have never finished the Ph.D. program in organizational psychology in Bucharest, because in 1998 two major events happened: I won a green card at the Visa Lottery, which allowed me to come to the United States with all the rights and, at the same time, I was offered a Fulbright Fellowship for graduate study in psychology in the US. I had to choose between the two, for they excluded each other, and I decided to take the green card, giving up the Fulbright. It was a tough decision, but after I made it I enthusiastically came to the United States prepared to start over and work as a cab driver, but I was soon admitted into a doctoral program in psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York.

I finished my PhD in 2003 with a dissertation on voluntary turnover. After pursuing a postdoctoral position at Weill Medical College of Cornell University (2003-2004), I was appointed an Instructor of Psychology at the same institution, in the Department of Psychiatry, and then Assistant Professor. I am currently a Professor of Psychology at Berkeley College, New York.

I use my spare time to ride my bicycle, play music and write. I like to immerse myself in the characters I depict in my books. They feel a part of me. They are a part of me. I have recently put increasingly more effort in writing, at the expense of other things I used to keep myself busy with. Writing calms me down, transports me in other worlds, makes me feel good. I wish my readers have the same sentiment when they read my stories.