Scientific background

I am a Professor of Physics at Brandeis University, where I am a member of the Quantum and Gravitational Theory Group and the Astrophysics and Geophysics group.

I am also a member of the DOE-funded QuantISED consortium “Complex Quantum Systems and the Quantum Universe”.

My research is in theoretical physics construed broadly, with an eye to connections between disparate areas of physics. My training and the bulk of my work has been in string theory, quantum field theory, and applications of these to cosmology. In recent years I have also been working on problems in physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, and the physics of climate.

History

I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and grew up in Upstate NY and Southern California. I received my A.B. in Physics in 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked for Prof. Paul Richards on instrumentation for balloon-borne cosmic microwave background observations, and did an undergraduate thesis under Prof. Mahiko Suzuki on the theory of neutrino oscillations. I received my PhD in Physics in 1996 at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Prof. Emil Martinec, doing research on string theory and black holes. After postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and SLAC/Stanford University, working in string theory and inflationary cosmology, I began as faculty at Brandeis.

I begain working in physical oceanography during a sabbatical in 2018 at MIT’s department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, and was then interrupted by becoming Department chair. For the 2023-24 academic year, I was on leave as a Visiting Associate in the Environmental Sciences and Engineering Program at Caltech, courtesy of a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship, where I am embedding in Joern Callies’ Ocean Physics group.