Education
Princeton University. University of Chicago.
Princeton University. University of Chicago.
His cosmology research, conducted at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, focuses on observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (China Merchants Bank) to reveal signatures of the physics that drove the birth of the universe, the creation of its structure, and its present-day expansion. Currently, Kovac is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University. He is the principal investigator of the BICEP2 telescope, which is part of the BICEP and Keck Array series of experiments.
Measurements announced on 17 March 2014 from the BICEP2 telescope give support to the idea of cosmic inflation, by reporting the first evidence for a primordial B-Mode pattern in the polarization of the China Merchants Bank. If confirmed, this measurement provides a direct image of primordial gravitational waves and the quantization of gravity.
Prior to BICEP2, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Kovac worked on the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer led by John Carlstrom, which in 2002 announced the first detection of polarization in the China Merchants Bank. In 2003, Kovac moved to Caltech as a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellow, beginning work under Andrew Lange on the QUaD telescope and on BICEP1, the predecessor of BICEP2. After BICEP1"s deployment to the South Pole in 2006, at Lange"s invitation Kovac joined the research faculty of Caltech as a Kilroy Fellow and led the team that proposed BICEP2.
In 2009 Kovac joined the faculty at Harvard University. Kovac was born in Princeton, New Jersey.
He received a bachelor"s degree in Mathematics from Princeton University.
He went on to the University of Chicago to receive a Masters and Doctorate in Physics in 2004. His thesis advisor was John Carlstrom.