Allan Adams earned degrees in physics form Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, and spent three years in the Harvard Society of Fellows, before joining the faculty of the MIT Dept of Physics in 2008. Along the way, Adams developed a passion for ocean conservation and photography; his documentary work and art have been exhibited at the New England Aquarium, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Boston Museum of Science, the The Charles Hayden Planetarium, The Franklin Institute, and beyond.
In 2016, after many years happily exploring the physics of black holes and string theory, Adams officially switched his research focus to engineering and communication for ocean conservation. In January of 2017, Adams opened the Future Ocean Lab, devoted to developing low-cost, low-power sensors and imaging technologies for marine research, and to using those technologies to document the world’s changing oceans.
Adams is also a dedicated educator and public speaker — his introductory lectures on quantum mechanics from MIT have been viewed nearly two million times, and his TED talks have been viewed more than that 3 million times. His 2016 TED talk about the LIGO discovery of Gravitational Waves was chosen as one of the top 10 TED Talks of 2016.