My research interests currently focus on emergent properties of the quark-gluon plasma, such as how it thermalizes, how its very low shear viscosity is generated, how it interacts with pairs of heavy quarks (quarkonia), how it reacts to magnetic fields, and how experimentally accessible probes can tell us more about these properties. I have also taken an active interest in the science that can be done at a future electron-ion collider and helped convince the Department of energy to initiate the construction of such a facility. More peripheral research interests include the viscous dynamics of matter falling into a black hole, the question of "thermalization" in the absence of a heat bath, and the possible physics of a world with two time dimensions.
