Ken Olum is a Research Professor in the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, where he has worked since 1997. He studies gravitational waves, cosmic strings, negative energies in quantum field theory, energy conditions and exotic phenomena in general relativity, and anthropic reasoning and other issues in cosmology. He is a member of the NANOGrav collaboration, which searches for low-frequency gravitational waves via precision timing of pulsars.
Olum received his PhD from the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics, and his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation for his work on gravitational waves and cosmic strings and from the Foundational Questions Institute for his work in negative energies and exotic phenomenon in general relativity.
He gives guest lectures in high school and middle school classes on such topics as gravitational waves, time travel, and black holes, as part of the NSF-sponsored “Physics Theory Net” program.
