Dr. Sarang Gopalakrishnan was born in Calcutta, India, and grew up there and in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He graduated from Amherst College (2006) with a BA in Physics and Mathematics, and has a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2012). He has since been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (2012-2015) and a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at Caltech (2015-2016). His research ranges widely across the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics, atomic physics, and quantum optics. A particular recent focus is on systems that are far from thermal equilibrium and in which the approach to equilibrium is anomalously slow.