Sean Carroll

Born on 5 October 1966 in Philadelphia, Sean Carroll is a physicist, cosmologist, and science communicator. Carroll received his BS from Villanova University in 1988 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1993, both in astronomy. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before becoming an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago in 1999. Since 2006 he has been a research professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. His research has centered on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, as well as dark matter and dark energy, extra dimensions, and symmetry violations. Carroll has written several popular physics books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe , which won the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize, and a graduate textbook, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has received prizes and fellowships from such organizations as NSF, NASA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Carroll has served as a science consultant for television and movies and hosts the weekly Mindscape podcast . (Photo credit: Sgerbic, CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Date in History: 5 October 1966