In a nutshell...

In the beginning, the Universe was born in a gigantic explosion. Some time later, I was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and received a B.Sc. in physics and astronomy from the University of Calgary in 1994. I then went to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, to study gravitational physics under Kip Thorne. I defended my Ph.D. in 1999, and did a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee for two years. During that time (October 15, 2000), I married Pu Chen (陈朴). I returned to Caltech for a second postdoc starting in 2001, and a third postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2005. In 2007 I took a faculty position at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

The following timeline puts these events in their proper context. The axis scaling exponentially approaches both of its endpoints in time (the Big Bang in one direction, the present day in the other), according to the bilogarithmic or “logistic” differential equation: