Chad is currently the Gordon Gould Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College, and he writes books about science for non-scientists. He has a BA in physics from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park (studying laser cooling at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the lab of Bill Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel in Physics). He was a post-doc at Yale, and has been at Union since 2001.