Michael S. Turner is a theoretical astrophysicist and the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is also Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago, which he helped to establish, and formerly served as the President of the American Physical Society. He received his B.S. from Caltech (1971), his M.S. (1973) and Ph.D. (1978) from Stanford.
Turner helped to pioneer the interdisciplinary field of particle astrophysics and cosmology, and with Edward Kolb initiated the Fermilab astrophysics program. He led the National Academy study Quarks to the Cosmos that laid out the strategic vision for the field. Turner’s scholarly contributions include predicting cosmic acceleration and coining the term dark energy, showing how quantum fluctuations evolved into the seed perturbations for galaxies during cosmic inflation, and several key ideas that led to the cold dark matter theory of structure formation.
Turner’s current national service includes membership on the NRC’s Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPUP) and on the Senior Editorial Board of Science Magazine, Chairmanship of the OECD Global Science Forum’s Astroparticle Physics International Forum, a member of the Board of Directors of the Fermi Research Alliance, the Secretary of Class I of the National Academy of Sciences, and the founding Chair of ScienceCounts, which promotes the awareness and support of science.