In this talk, I will describe work on some of the most compelling motivations for physics beyond the standard model and cosmology, emphasizing ideas from effective field theory and constraints from fundamental principles and observations. This includes modified spacetime symmetries, early universe inflation, dark matter, new astrophysical phenomena, and axions.

Mark Hertzberg did his Undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Sydney. He then obtained his PhD at MIT. Mark was then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and MIT. In 2015 Mark became faculty at Tufts University, and is now Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Cosmology. This semester Mark is also visiting Harvard and MIT. Mark works on a range of topics at the interface of theoretical cosmology and particle physics. Some examples of work are: Mark proved rigorous results on the absence of cosmic acceleration in string theory, Mark formulated the effective field theory of large scale structure (which has over 500 citations), Mark proved that rotation symmetry plus locality of spin 2 requires Lorentz symmetry, Mark computed and made projections for new astrophysical signatures of dark matter axions, Mark placed rigorous constraints on new gravitational theories, Mark showed that light scalar models do not solve the galactic core-cusp problem.