I was born in August of 1960, in Barnet, Hertfordshire, just north of London, U.K., and grew up in Finchley, a northern suburb of London. After attending local schools, and spending my teenage years losing a lot of tennis matches and thrashing away at the drums for a succession of pretty awful bands, I went to Cambridge University to lose more tennis matches, play in an only marginally better band, and also study physics, graduating in June of 1981. I then spent a year in Los Angeles as a student at UCLA, after which I returned to London to begin graduate work at Imperial College. In 1985 I left the U.K. once again, this time for Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A., and what I thought would be a two-year stint as a postdoctoral research associate. It's more than two decades later...
Very shortly after arriving in Urbana I had the great good fortune to meet Jenny Singleton, who was, in 1988, to become my wife. We now have two wonderful children, a son Oliver Claude Singleton Goldbart (b. December 18, 1993), and a daughter Greta Glenn Singleton Goldbart (b. July 1, 1997). For thirteen years we lived on quiet, leafy, cobbled, Iowa Street in Urbana, deep in the heart of the faculty ghetto, in a house that was rather too yellow on the outside and rather too cluttered with books and toys on the inside than we would have preferred, but otherwise was wonderful. In July of 2001 we moved just a few blocks away, to Pennsylvania Avenue, and are working hard to ensure that our new home, too, is thoroughly cluttered with books and toys.