Christian Armendariz-Picon is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Syracuse University. Currently he is spending a year on leave to stay with his family, which lives in Canton. His research area is theoretical cosmology, where he studies questions related to the origin and evolution of the universe. Christian’s interests have mostly revolved about the nature of the “dark” components that constitute most of the universe, and the properties of the initial seeds of structure that grew into the galaxies and clusters that populate the universe.