About
Rob Knop grew up (mostly) in California, where he spent much of his youth programming the Commodore 64, playing the violin, and acting in school theater productions. He studied physics in college, and obtained a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997. After spending five years with the Supernova Cosmology Project and helping to discover the existence of Dark Energy, he was on the faculty in the Physics & Astronomy department at Vanderbilt University for six years. He bitterly fled academia in the face of a funding crunch and unflinching expected “standards” for tenure. He is very sad that Obama wasn’t president earlier, to infuse cash into the NSF; that might have preserved his ability to stay working at his calling.
For just under two years, he worked for Linden Lab, first as a production operations engineer for Second Life, then as the Second Life server release manager.
He is now unemployed and stressed about that.
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