Physicist and musician Stephon Alexander has straddled the two worlds of theoretical physics and jazz music over the last two decades. He obtained his Bachelors of Science from Haverford College and Doctorate from Brown and was a research physicist at Imperial College, London and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University.
On the physics front Alexander's works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the big bang with sub atomic phenomena. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-Branes. In such models the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation.