Dr. Dan Hooper is a cosmologist and particle physicist whose work focuses on dark matter, cosmic rays, and neutrino astrophysics. Currently, he is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center. He cohosts the podcast "Why This Universe?" Hooper has published three books about astrophysics: "Dark Cosmos: In Search of our Universe’s Missing Mass and Energy," published in 2006, "Nature’s Blueprint: Supersymmetry and the Search for a Unified Theory of Matter and Force," published in 2008, and "At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe's First Seconds," published in 2019.