James Kakalios

James Kakalios, an internationally recognized expert on Superhero Science, is the Taylor Distinguished Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He received his B.S. degree (summa cum laude) from the City College of New York in 1979 and went to the University of Chicago for his graduate study in physics.  He received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1985 and was a post-doctoral research associate at the Xerox-Palo Alto Research Center in California. In 1988, having had enough of those California winters, he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where he has been ever since.

In 2001 he created a Freshman Seminar class at the University of Minnesota entitled: “Everything I Know About Science I Learned from Reading Comic Books” (which, his colleagues say, explains a great deal!).  This class covered everything from Isaac Newton to the transistor, but there’s not an inclined plane or pulley in sight.  Rather, ALL the examples come from superhero comic books, and as much as possible, those cases where the superheroes get their physics right! This class received a great deal of media attention in 2002, coinciding with the release of the SONY film, Spider-Man. One gratifying result from this attention was the hundreds of emails from students, teachers and those long out of school, who liked the idea of using superheroes to teach physics and enquired whether he had a book on this topic.

His popular science book THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES was published in 2005 in the U.S. and the U.K. and has been translated into six languages.  The SPECTACULAR SECOND EDITION was published in November 2009, followed by THE AMAZING STORY OF QUANTUM MECHANICS (2010), and THE PHYSICS OF EVERYDAY THINGS: The Extraordinary Science Behind an Ordinary Day (2017). These books led to hundreds of speaking opportunities, at venues ranging from high schools to the 92^nd St. Y; from M.I.T. to the San Diego ComicCon; from FermiLab to the Library of Congress.

He has been the invited keynote speaker at the Perugia Science Festival, (Perugia, Italy) 2007, Alpbach Technology Forum (Alpbach, Austria) 2011, 2013, 2018, Edinburgh Book Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland) 2013, USA Science and Engineering Festival, Washington DC, 2010, 2012, 2014, the Turin Science Festival (Turin, Italy) 2014, and the Teach-In Event at the March for Science, Washington DC, 2018, 2019. At the invitation from the U.S. State Department, he gave a series of talks to inspire students in STEM education in Portugal, 2013, where he travelled the country and presented nine talks in six days. The positive response from this trip led to a return invitation from the State Dept. where he gave a series of talks (seven talks in five days) in the Azures and Madeira in 2014.

In 2007, in response to a request from the National Academy of Sciences, he served as the volunteer science consultant for the Warner Bros. superhero film Watchmen. In 2009 Kakalios made a short video on the Science of Watchmen, which has been viewed nearly 2 million times on youtube.com.  This video won an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award in 2009 and was nominated for a national WEBBY award in 2010. His volunteer consulting continued with The Amazing Spider-Man (Sony, 2012). A video produced with the University of Minnesota (Spider-Man and the Decay Rate Algorithm), explaining basic principles of Gompertz equation, has been viewed over 80,000 times on youtube.com.

His research interests include nanocrystalline and amorphous semiconductors and fluctuation phenomena in neurological systems. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has served as the Chair of the APS Committee on Informing the Public and the Chair of the APS Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. His efforts at science communication and public outreach have been recognized with the 2014 AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award, the American Institute of Physics’ 2016 Andrew Gemant Award, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lincoln (U.K.) in 2017 and the American Association of Physics Teachers Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award (2020). He has been reading comic books longer than he has been studying physics.