Michael Turner

Michael Turner is a theoretical cosmologist and the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He was formerly the Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation. Turner helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines together cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis, and the nature of “dark energy,” a term he coined in 1998. His book The Early Universe, co-written with fellow Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb, is a standard text on the subject of cosmology. For his groundbreaking work, Turner has received the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (APS), the Klopsted Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Heineman Prize of the AAS and American Institute of Physics; and the Darwin Lecture of the Royal Astronomical Society. Currently, Turner is Chairman of the Board of the Aspen Center for Physics, a Director of the Fermi Research Alliance, and a member of the Governing Board of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS Council). He is also the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, which he helped establish. Turner received his B.S. in physics from California Institute of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He also holds an honorary D.Sc. from Michigan State University and served as president of the American Physical Society in 2013.

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