Marolf gained his Ph.D. from
University of Texas at Austin in 1992, under
Bryce DeWitt with a thesis on'' Green's Bracket Algebras and Their Quantization''. His undergraduate degree is from
William Jewell College in 1987. After postdoctoral positions at
Syracuse,
Penn State, and UCSB, he joined the physics department at Syracuse as an assistant professor in 1996. In 2003, he moved to UCSB as an associate professor. He was chair of the physics department at the UCSB from 2016 to 2018. Marolf is an expert on black hole thermodynamics, gravitational aspects in string theory, classical and quantum gravity. In the past he has worked on the canonical approach to quantum gravity, lower-dimensional models of quantum gravity, issues related to quantization of diffeomorphism-invariant theories, and a number of other topics. He is best known for originating the
black hole firewall paradox. ==See also==