Louis A. Bloomfield is Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and author of How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary (Wiley, 2008).

Bloomfield received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983 and was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories before arriving at the University of Virginia in 1985. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research in atomic, condensed matter, and optical physics, including the Apker Award of the American Physical Society, a Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, a Young Investigator Award of the Office of Naval Research, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Bloomfield has also been widely recognized for his teaching of physics and science to thousands of non-science students at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a 1998 State of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award and the 2001 Pegram Medal of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. He is the author of more than 100 publications in the fields of atomic clusters, autoionizing states, high-resolution laser spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, computer science, and general science literacy, and of a recent introductory textbook entitled How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life, 4th Edition (Wiley, New York, 20106).

Bloomfield also works extensively with professional societies and the media to explain physics to the general public and co-hosted the television series Some Assembly Required on the Discovery Channel (2007-2008). He frequently serves as a physics consultant and as an expert witness on legal matters that require a broad understanding of physics and scientific issues.