Packard Foundation honors University physics professor

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has named Sean Carroll, Assistant Professor in Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, a 2000 Packard fellow, an honor that includes a five-year, $625,000 research grant.

A Chicago faculty member since 1999, Carroll is one of 24 promising young faculty members selected this year to receive the fellowship from the Packard Foundation of Los Altos, Calif. The late David Packard, co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and the late Lucile Salter Packard, created the foundation in 1964.

“Since I’m a theorist, I don’t have any large pieces of equipment to buy,” Carroll said. “Instead, I’ll spend the Packard funds on trying to bring together people who are experts in the different areas that overlap to form my research interests––cosmology, particle physics, string theory and general relativity.”

During extended stays at the University, Carroll’s visitors will join him in an attempt to relate speculative theories about the nature of space and time to the observable constraints imposed on them by the real universe.

Earlier this year, Carroll received a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan fellowship carries a $40,000 award in unrestricted research funds.