Brooks Thomas is a theoretical particle physicist and a professor in the Physics Department at Lafayette College.  He received his BA from Macalester college and his PhD from the University of Michigan.  He has held postdoctoral research appointments at the University of Arizona, the University of Hawaii, and Carleton University, as well as visiting faculty appointments at Reed College and Colorado College.  His research extends over a variety of topics in particle physics and cosmology, but his recent work has been focused on the efforts to answer two fundamental unsolved questions about our universe.  The first of these questions is what the nature of the as-yet mysterious "dark matter" is that seems to constitute the vast majority of the matter in our universe, but about which we presently know very little.  The second is how our universe evolved since the Big Bang and came to look the way it does when we look out at it through telescopes today.