Sean Carroll is a Senior
Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He did his undergraduate work at Villanova University, and
received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Harvard in 1993. His research involves theoretical physics and astrophysics, focusing on issues
in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation.
Carroll is active in education and outreach, giving public lectures and appearing on radio and television. He is a blogger at Cosmic Variance (http://cosmicvariance.com), the most popular physics blog on the internet, with over 20,000 visits per week. He has written for SEED, Sky & Telescope, Nature, New Scientist, The American Scientist, and Physics Today. He is a frequent speaker, having given over two hundred scientific seminars and colloquia and over fifty educational and popular talks. His personal website (http://preposterousuniverse.com) contains links to his papers, talks, and other activities.
Prior to arriving at Caltech, Carroll was on the faculty of the Physics Department and Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago, and before that did postdoctoral research at MIT and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has made contributions to the theory of topological defects, violations of spacetime symmetries, two-dimensional quantum gravity, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, models of brane worlds and extra dimensions, the origin of cosmological magnetic fields, causality violation in general relativity, and quantum supergravity. His current research involves models of dark matter and dark energy, cosmological modifications of Einstein's general relativity, the physics of inflationary cosmology, and the origin of time asymmetry. He has also given invited talks at conferences devoted to literature, philosophy, education, and theology.
While a postdoc at MIT Carroll won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for his course on General Relativity. The lecture notes from this course have been expanded into the textbook "Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity," published by Addison-Wesley in 2003. He has received research grants from NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations. He has been the Malmstrom Lecturer at Hamline University and the Resnick Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was awarded the Arts and Sciences Alumni Medallion from Villanova University.