Brian Keating

About Brian Keating

Brian Gregory Keating is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the BICEP, POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. He received his PhD in 2000, and is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California, San Diego since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.

Keating received his B.S. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1993. He received his M.S. in Physics from Brown University in 1995, and subsequently studied for his PhD also at Brown. His thesis, titled A search for the large angular scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background and supervised by Peter Timbie, was accepted in 2000. He started as a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in 2001 until 2004. He was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego from 2004, before being promoted to Associate Professor there in 2009. He received an NSF career grant in 2005, and a Presidential Early Career Award in 2006. Keating was one of three scientists, along with Jonathan Kaufman and Bradley Johnson, to receive the Buchalter Cosmology Prize in 2014. He became co-director of the Ax Center for Experimental Cosmology and the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Program in Astrophysics in 2013.

Keating became a Professor at UC San Diego in 2014. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. In 2019 he became the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, in the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences, which is part of the Department of Physics. Keating received an Excellence in Stewardship Award in 2018/19, and is an honorary member of the National Society of Black Physicists. He is co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination at UC San Diego. He received the Horace Mann Medal from Brown University Graduate School in 2022.

Keating researches cosmology, focusing on the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the universe. He conceived the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) instrument, which observed from the South Pole. BICEP received a NASA Group Achievement Award in 2010. In 2016 he convinced the Simons Foundation to provide US$38.4m of funding for what later became the Simons Array, and in 2019 a US$20m grant from the Simons Foundation led to the creation of the Simons Observatory, followed by an additional US$4.6m in 2021. Keating co-leads POLARBEAR2 and the Simons Array in Chile, and has raised around US$100m of funding for CMB telescopes. He has two patents, on a “wide-bandwidth polarization modulator for microwave and mm-wavelengths” in 2009, and “Tunnel junction fabrication” in 2016.