A. W. Peet

A. W. Peet (born 1968) is a professor of physics at the University of Toronto. Peet's research interests include string theory as a quantum theory of gravity, quantum field theory and applications of string theory to black holes, gauge theories, cosmology, and the correspondence between anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories (Maldacena duality).

Early life
Peet was born in New Zealand in 1968.

Career
In 1990, Peet received a Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of Canterbury, and a doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 1994. From 1994 to 1997, they worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara from 1997 to 2000. Since 2000, they have been teaching and conducting research as an established professor at the University of Toronto. Peet is also an affiliate of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Personal life
Peet is non-binary, uses they/them pronouns, and is a New Zealand citizen with a passport using an unspecified gender. Peet chose to come out publicly to support queer youth in STEM fields.

Peet debated their fellow University of Toronto colleague, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, about gender identities, on Canadian public television on several occasions, garnering significant public attention. After the debate, Peet faced online harassment that negatively impacted their mental health.

Peet is disabled and experiences chronic pain. My primary disability is chronic neuromuscular pain, affecting my neck, shoulders, back, left arm, and left leg. It originates in accident traumas, primarily a bad skiing accident at the end of the 1990s. Almost twenty years after initial diagnosis in a city full of medical expertise, I know that there is no cure for my pain or treatment available worth the risks, so I have had to learn to adapt to it. This has required significant revision of the scope of my physics career ambitions. [...] I also have experience with three mental health (MH) conditions. I developed (mild) depression and (mild to moderate) anxiety as part of my chronic pain odyssey. Then in my early forties, I developed (moderate) PTSD, from six violent crimes committed against me in my twenties and thirties by seven different perpetrators, one of them a coworker. Nowadays, none of these MH histories tends to significantly disrupt my work over an extended period. But my combined experiences do make me more sensitive to students managing mental health conditions than the average physicist.

Since Peet's disabilities make them unable to comfortably carry bags and heavy objects using their arms and shoulders, they found alternative ways to use and access their belongings in electronic forms. Since 2003 I have had to profoundly shift my ways of working in order to adapt to long-term chronic pain disability. For example, I cannot comfortably carry a bag in my arms or on my shoulders, so I had to find alternatives. It took me years to find the right gear to reduce my everyday pain without isolating me from students and colleagues or breaking the budget. I am sharing my adaptation solutions here in the hope that they may help someone else find a quicker, cheaper solution to their own acccessibility conundrum. I scan all papers and acquire electronic copies of books, so that I can carry my briefcase on a USB stick (currently a 512GB USB3 Patriot Magnum 2). I began doing this routinely years before cloud services like Dropbox became commonplace. I also stripped down the gear I carry every day to a bare minimum, which I can usually fit in my pockets.

Awards

 * 2003: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, Harvard University
 * 2002: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
 * 2002: Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award
 * 2000-2006: Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Scholar, Cosmology and Gravity Program