Education and career Lisi was born in Los Angeles and raised in San Diego, California. He graduated from
Cate School in 1987. Lisi went on to receive two
B.S. degrees with highest honors in physics and mathematics from the
University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991. Lisi received a
Ph.D. in physics from the
University of California, San Diego, in 1999. Lisi then left academia. In July 2006, Lisi was awarded an
FQXi grant to conduct research in quantum mechanics and unification. In June 2007, Lisi thought that the algebraic structure he had constructed in an attempt to unify the
Standard Model of particle physics with
general relativity partially matched part of the algebraic structure of the
E Lie group. In July 2007, Lisi traveled to the inaugural FQXi conference in
Reykjavík,
Iceland, to give several academic talks. Lisi's paper, "
An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything", Lisi presented his theory at the
TED Conference on 28 February 2008, and has since presented several academic talks and colloquia. The theory has been extensively criticized in the scientific community. After a one-year extension to allow for more data collection from the
Large Hadron Collider, Frank Wilczek conceded the superparticle bet to Lisi in 2016. ==Physics research==