Flip Tanedo is an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of California, Riverside where he is known for being covered in chalk dust after a long day’s work. His goal is to figure out what dark matter is and how it fits into our understanding of fundamental science. Flip grew up in Los Angeles and fell in love with physics after reading The Physics of Star Trek. This carried into degrees in mathematics and physics at Stanford, Cambridge, and Durham, a Ph.D at Cornell and a postdoc at UC Irvine.