Steve Giddings

Steven Giddings is a quantum physicist who studies questions of the fundamental nature of matter, forces, and spacetime, and behavior of their most extreme manifestations, in black holes and the early universe. He first visited the Aspen Center for Physics as a University of Utah undergraduate in the early 1980s.  He went on to earn his PhD at Princeton in 1987, and was then a postdoc and Junior Fellow at Harvard until 1990.  Since then he has been on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is now a Distinguished Professor.  He has been a visiting researcher at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and CERN.  When not pondering deep mysteries, he enjoys mountain biking, backcountry skiing, climbing, and kayaking, and sometimes attempts to surf.