Lee Smolin earned his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard, then went on to teach at Yale and Pennsylvania State before helping to found the innovative Perimeter Institute. He is the author of The Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Photo by Lumidek at English Wikipedia (Own work by the original uploader) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.