BRIAN KEATING is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave, and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S. patents.
Keating received his B.S. from Case Western Reserve University in 1993. He was a NASA graduate student fellow at Brown University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2000. He did postdoctoral research at Stanford University and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech before coming to UCSD in 2004. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called "BICEP." In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and became the Principal Investigator of the Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiment in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
Keating is also a commercially licensed pilot with single and multi-engine instrument and turbine ratings. He is a Trustee of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Math for America, San Diego, and the San Diego Air & Space Museum. He is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor.