Hooper received his PhD in physics in 2003 from the
University of Wisconsin, under the supervision of
Francis Halzen. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the
University of Oxford between 2003 and 2005, and the David Schramm Fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (
Fermilab) from 2005 until 2007. He is currently a senior scientist at Fermilab and a professor in the astronomy and astrophysics department at the University of Chicago. Since 2017, he has been the head of Fermilab's Theoretical Astrophysics Group. The most highly cited of these papers includes a 2005 review of dark matter (co-authored by Gianfranco Bertone and
Joseph Silk), as well as a series of papers written between 2009 and 2014 on the
Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope's
Galactic Center excess and its possible connection to annihilating dark matter. In 2017 he was elected to become a fellow of the
American Physical Society, "For pursuing the identity of dark matter by combining careful analysis of observational data with theoretical ideas from both particle physics and astrophysics." On September 9, 2024, Hooper will begin his role as the director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). He will hold a joint faculty appointment at the UW-Madison Department of Physics. ==Popular books and podcast==