Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1941. He received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and attended the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1967. He spent the next four years at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist. In 1971 he joined University of California, Irvine, as a teacher, becoming a full professor of physics in 1979. Benford was always a fan of science fiction and his first published story, "Stand In" (1965), won second place in a contest at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Deeper Than the Darkness (1970), dealt with alien contact, but the novel which established his reputation was Timescape (1980), winner of both a Nebula and a Campbell Memorial Award. Other novels include thrillers Artifact (1985), Chiller (as by Sterling Blake, 1993), Cosm (1998), and Eater (2000). Benford has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and MIT, and served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. In 1989, he was host and scriptwriter for the television series, "A Galactic Odyssey", which described physics and astronomy from the perspective of the galaxy's evolution, an eight-part series produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.

In 1995 he received the Lord Prize for achievements in the sciences. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He worked on long-term marking of the major U.S. nuclear waste site (how do you warn people 10,000 years from now that the land used for radioactive waste is dangerous?), helped design the message to fly on the 1998 Cassini mission to Saturn, and participated in the planning and writing of text for the CD placed aboard the 1999 Russian Mars lander. He was Guest of Honor at the 1999 Worldcon in Australia.