Brian Keating

Brian Gregory Keating (born September 9, 1971) is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the BICEP, POLARBEAR2, and Simons Array experiments. He received his Ph.D. in 2000 and has been a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.

Brian was born on September 9, 1971. His father is the mathematician James Ax, and his mother is named Barbara. After Ax and Barbara divorced when Brian was about seven, Barbara remarried a man named Keating, and Brian took his stepfather's name. Brian was out of contact with his father for the next 15 years, reconnecting when Brian was a graduate student. Brian has a brother, Kevin, who is three years older. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry.

As a youth, Keating was a member of the Catholic Church. He later became an atheist and, subsequently, became Jewish, describing himself as a 'practicing devout agnostic.' As well as a cosmologist, he is a pilot with a multi-engine turbine license. He was a trustee of Math for America, San Diego from 2006–2014, Angel Flight West from 2010–2015, and the National Museum of Mathematics from 2014–2017. He is currently a trustee of the San Diego Air & Space Museum since 2013 and has been on the Ruben H. Fleet Museum advisory council since 2017.

Keating received his B.S. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1993. He received his M.S. in Physics from Brown University in 1995 and subsequently studied for his Ph.D. also at Brown. His thesis, titled A search for the large angular scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background and supervised by Peter Timbie, was accepted in 2000. He started as a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in 2001 until 2004. 

He was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, from 2004, before being promoted to Associate Professor there in 2009. He received an NSF career grant in 2005 and a Presidential Early Career Award in 2006. Keating was one of three scientists, along with Jonathan Kaufman and Bradley Johnson, to receive the Buchalter Cosmology Prize in 2014. He became co-director of the Ax Center for Experimental Cosmology and the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Program in Astrophysics in 2013.

Keating became a Professor at UC San Diego in 2014. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. In 2019 he became the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, in the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences, which is part of the Department of Physics. Keating received an Excellence in Stewardship Award in 2018/19 and is an honorary member of the National Society of Black Physicists. He is co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination at UC San Diego. He received the Horace Mann Medal from Brown University Graduate School in 2022.

Keating researches cosmology, focusing on the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the universe. He conceived the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) instrument observed from the South Pole. BICEP received a NASA Group Achievement Award in 2010. In 2016 he convinced the Simons Foundation to provide US$38.4m of funding for what later became the Simons Array. 

In 2019, a US$20m grant from the Simons Foundation led to the creation of the Simons Observatory, followed by an additional US$4.6m in 2021. Keating co-leads POLARBEAR2 and the Simons Array in Chile and has raised around US$100m of funding for CMB telescopes. He has two patents, on a "wide-bandwidth polarization modulator for microwave and mm-wavelengths" in 2009 and "Tunnel junction fabrication" in 2016.