Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Keith Alison Olive
University of Minnesota

Citation:

"for outstanding contributions across a broad spectrum of fields including nuclear physics, particle physics, theoretical and observational astrophysics, and cosmology, especially Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the properties of dark matter."

Background:

Professor Keith A. Olive received all of his educational degrees from the University of Chicago: a B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in physics, both in 1978, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1981. He was a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellow from 1979-1981, and a 1981 fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he began his postdoctoral research. He received a NATO-National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at CERN from 1982-1983, followed by the newly formed Fermilab-Astrophysics Group. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1985 and was awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987, the George Taylor Research Award in 1988, and the Distinguished McKnight University Professorship in 1998. He has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 2003 and is a member of the Particle Data Group. He has been director of the Fine Theoretical Physics Institute (1999-2005,2013-present). Olive’s research is in the area of particle physics and cosmology as well as nuclear astrophysics. His main interests are: particle dark matter, particularly as it pertains to supersymmetric theories; Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which is an explanation of the origin of the light element isotopes through Li7; Big Bang baryogenesis, the theory behind the matter-antimatter asymmetry; theories of variable fundamental parameters, and inflation which is a theory constructed to resolve many outstanding problems in standard cosmology. He has published over 400 papers on these topics in refereed journals.


Selection Committee:

2018 Selection Committee Members: Robert B. Wiringa (Chair), Dan Kasen, Marc Kamionkowski, Manuel Piembert, Yongzhong Qian