Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego. Principal Investigator and co-founder, Simons Observatory.
I am an experimental cosmologist. I build instruments that measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background in order to test what happened in the first moments of the universe — principally by searching for the B-mode signature of primordial gravitational waves from inflation.
Background
I received my B.S. from Case Western Reserve University and my Ph.D. from Brown University in 2000. I did postdoctoral research at Stanford University and held an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2004, where I am a member of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences.
At Caltech and then at UC San Diego I conceived and led the first BICEP telescope at the South Pole. In 2007 I received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House for that work. I subsequently led the POLARBEAR-2 and Simons Array experiments in Chile, and in 2016 co-founded the Simons Observatory, where I serve as Principal Investigator. I am an author of more than 100 scientific publications and hold U.S. patents.
Writing
I wrote Losing the Nobel Prize (W. W. Norton, 2018), an account of the BICEP2 episode and an argument about the distorting effect of scientific prizes, and Into the Impossible, on how discoveries actually get made. My public writing, lectures, podcast, and newsletter are collected at briankeating.com.
Service
I am a Trustee of the National Museum of Mathematics and serve on the boards of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Math for America San Diego, and the San Diego Air & Space Museum. I am also a private pilot with single- and multi-engine instrument ratings.
Brian Keating 