I must preface this page by noting that I don't usually write about myself in the third person, and nor am I so extroverted as to write about myself at all. However occasionally in the past I have been asked for information for different projects (ie introductions to my lectures, or blurbs for articles and book jackets, etc), and the following are excerpts and compilations of those brief biographies.
Dr. Chris Bird is a theoretical physicist and mathematician by training, working primarily in high energy particle physics and cosmology.
In 1999, Chris started graduate school at the University of Alberta before family health issues forced him to return to his hometown of Victoria,BC and enroll in the graduate program at the University of Victoria. He completed a series of research projects there and at the TRIUMF Laboratory on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,BC, and in September 2001 successfully defended a thesis entitled "Infrared Regularization in Relativistic Chiral Perturbation Theory". (translation: a study of new methods and theories for studying low energy nuclear reactions). In November 2001 he was awarded a Masters of Science degree in physics for this work.
By 2002 Chris had enrolled again in the graduate program at the University of Victoria with the intention of earning a doctorate in physics, and received a federal NSERC fellowship to continue his research. In 2008 he presented and successfully defended a doctoral dissertation entitled "The Early Universe as a Probe of New Physics" and in June 2009 was awarded a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Victoria.
Outside of academic pursuits, Chris also pursues numerous hobbies. As an amateur genealogist he has traced his family history back to 700AD, and is descended from royalty. As a semi-professional or serious amateur photographer he has taken over 100,000 photographs, some of which have been published in books and magazines internationally. As a computer programmer he was written, sold, and distributed screensavers, utilities, scientific applications and games around the world. As a lexicographer he has published a dictionary of obscure words which has garnered a million hits online and sold countless copies in printed form. As a roboticist he participated in the development of an open-source remote rover platform in addition to building numerous robots of his own. He has competed internationally in mathematics, chemistry and physics competitions and has been the subject of a Wikipedia page. He has worked as a computer programmer, a tutor, a lab instructor, and a research assistant. For ten years he was a full-time caregiver for his disabled parents, while also a fulltime graduate student. He can play four musical instruments and can read French, German, Gaelic, and Latin. (And he is very modest :) )
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