Jorge Cham

Jorge Cham is the creator of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD), the comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in grad school.

Often called the Dilbert of academia, PhD has appeared in the Stanford, MIT, Caltech and Carnegie Mellon newspapers among others, and it is published online where it receives over 2.7 million page views a month from over 1000 universities and colleges worldwide.

Jorge Cham was born and raised in the Republic of Panama. He obtained his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (specializing in Robotics) from Stanford University, where he started drawing PHD. He was subsequently an Instructor and Research Associate at Caltech.

Life is tough and then you graduate, the second collection of PhD comics to date, was published in April 2005.

A recent survey by U.C. Berkeley found that 95% of all graduate students feel overwhelmed, and over 67% have felt seriously depressed at some point in their careers. In this talk, Jorge Cham will recount his experiences bringing humor into the lives of stressed out academics, examine the source of their anxieties and explore the guilt, the myth, and the power of procrastination.

PhD Piled, Higher and Deeper Website