Professor Tom Banks grew up in Brooklyn NY and has lived in OR, MA, CA, NJ, GA and Israel. He was determined to be a theoretical physicist since high school and is a founding member of the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He works in particle physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics and the attempt to quantize Einstein's theory of gravity. He's still active in research at the age of 71.