Lisa Randall

DARK MATTER’S BRIGHTEST SCIENTIST.

- Peter Gietl

Dr. Lisa Randall is a scientist who is comfortable pondering the enigmatic reaches of the universe and trying to make sense of it all. She has been named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous books, including The New York Times bestsellers Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World – books that seek to elucidate difficult-to-grasp aspects of particle physics.

She is also unique compared to many “celebrity scientists,” a term that Dr. Randall would probably bristle at, because her work is still very much on the cutting edge of research in her field. The fact that she can write books that can explain dark matter to the masses while at the same time challenging the paradigms of the brightest minds in physics speaks to an intellect that is constantly seeking news ways of examining the mysteries of the universe. Her meteoric rise in her field began when she proposed, along with Dr. Raman Sundrum, the Randall-Sundrum model, which used warped geometry to describe our world as situated in a higher dimension of a five-dimensional model. She has also made innumerable contributions to the understanding of the Standard Model and super symmetry.