Neil Turok

Neil Turok is one of the world's leading physicists, and a renowned educational innovator. Currently the director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, he was a professor of physics at Princeton and held a Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge. With Stephen Hawking, he developed the Hawking- Turok instanton solutions describing the birth of inflationary universes. He is the co-author, with Paul J. Steinhardt, of the critically acclaimed book Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang - Rewriting Cosmic History. Turok was awarded the 1992 James Clerk Maxwell medal of the U.K. Institute of Physics, and was recently honoured with a prestigious TED Prize and a 'Most Innovative People' award at the 2008 World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Born in South Africa, Turok founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a pan-African network of centres for education and research. Turok now lives in Ontario, Canada.