After 15 years at Case Western Reserve University, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss is leaving the school for an innovative position at Arizona State University starting this August. He'll join the faculty as a professor in the school of earth and space exploration, and the university will be looking to Krauss to take a lead role in an emerging interdisciplinary initiative focused on the fundamental questions of our origins—in the widest sense. The initiative's research area will include the origin of such things as the universe, galaxies, consciousness, and culture, as well as humans. To help kick-start the project, Krauss is organizing a symposium for next April that will bring together Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Craig Venter, along with other leading scientists.
"Krauss has the rare ability to grasp the key foundational concepts across a range of sciences, and to explain them in an attractive and comprehensible way," physicist Paul Davies, who directs the research center Beyond at ASU, said in a press release. "His world-famous book The Physics of Star Trek well captures the fun-loving, daring and out-of-the box thinking of this renowned scientist." —Heather Wax