I was born in Manitoba and was raised in various places around Western Canada, Ontario and Europe. I received my B.Sc., with a joint honours in Physics and Applied Math from the University of Waterloo, and continued for doctoral work in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Texas in Austin under the supervision of Steven Weinberg. After doing a postdoctoral stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I became a professor at McGill University, ending up being appointed as a James McGill professor there in 2003. I am presently an Associate Member at PI with a joint appointment as a Professor within McMaster University's department of Physics and Astronomy. I was elected a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2008, and awarded the CAP/CRM medal for Theoretical Physics in 2010.
I am an unabashed high-energy particle theorist whose wild oats were sown (long ago) working in string theory, but my research interests have since taken a more phenomenological turn. At present my interests lie at the interface between string theory and lower-energy physics, with a particular emphasis on how the discovery of D-branes (and the realization that we may be trapped on one) may have observable consequences in particle physics and in cosmology. I have also been a tourist in some of those fields which are related to my own, and am interested in most of the neat applications of theoretical physics.
To the extent that there is a theme to my research, it would be the use of effective field theory techniques throughout high-energy physics and other fields. These techniques permit a general understand of the low-energy (or long-wavelength) behaviour of any physical system. They are particularly apt for our present situation in particle physics, where it appears that the energy scale of any unknown physics beyond the Standard Model is high compared to those that are experimentally accessible.