Edward W. Kolb (known to most as Rocky) is a founding head of the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The University of Chicago.
A native of New Orleans, he received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas. Postdoctoral research was performed at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer Research Fellow. He has served on editorial boards of several international scientific journals as well as Astronomy magazine.
Kolb is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was the recipient of the 2003 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the 1993 Quantrell Prize for teaching excellence at The University of Chicago. His book for the general public, Blind Watchers of the Sky, received the 1996 Emme Award of the American Aeronautical Society.
The field of Rocky's research is the application of elementary-particle physics to the very early Universe. In addition to over 200 scientific papers, he is a co-author of The Early Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology.
In addition to writing articles for magazines and books, he teaches cosmology to non-science majors at The University of Chicago and is involved with pre-college education by participating in Fermilab's Saturday Morning Physics Program for high-school students and the Department of Energy high-school physics program for gifted students as well as lecturing in institutes and workshops for science teachers.
He has traveled the world, if not yet the Universe, giving scientific and public lectures. In addition to occasional lectures at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, Rocky is a Harlow Shapley Visiting Lecturer and Centennial Lecturer with the American Astronomical Society. In recent years he has been selected by the American Physical Society and the International Conference on High-Energy Physics to present public lectures in conjunction with international physics meetings. Also on the international scene, he was the Shell Key Lecturer in Edinburgh, presented a special public lecture in Salonika Greece as part of the cultural celebration of that city, and was selected to address the president of Pakistan as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the country. He has also presented public lectures at the Royal Society of London, and in Rio de Janeiro, Valencia, and Barcelona.
He is a past Fellow of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. In recent years, Rocky was the Buhl lecturer in Pittsburgh, the Oppenheimer lecturer in Los Alamos, the Arthur lecturer at New York University, a Distinguished Lecturer in Cosmology at the National Science Foundation, and in Athens (Ohio) and Troy (New York) he presented the Graselli Lecture and the Resnick Lecture. This year he will be the Landsdowne lecturer at the University of Victoria in Canada, and the James lecturer at Purdue University.
Rocky has appeared in several television productions, and can also be seen in the OMNIMAX/IMAX film The Cosmic Voyage.
The University of Texas at Austin