Where do we come from? Science is making progress on this age-old question of humankind. The Universe was once much smaller than the size of an atom. Small things mattered in the small Universe, where quantum physics dominated the scene.

To understand the way the Universe is today, we have to solve remaining major puzzles. The Higgs boson that was discovered recently is holding our body together from evaporating in a nanosecond. But we still do not know what exactly it is. The mysterious dark matter is holding the galaxy together, and we would not have been born without it. But nobody has seen it directly. And what is the very beginning of the Universe?

Hitoshi Murayama is a theoretical physicist who works on the connection between the physics of the small (elementary particles) and the large (the Universe). In addition, he worked on a neutrino experiment and is currently leading a team of astronomers. He received his Ph.D. from University of Tokyo in 1991, had research positions at Tohoku University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and has been on faculty at University of California, Berkeley, since 1995. Since 2007, he is also a founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He received Yukawa Commemoration Prize and is a Fellow of American Physical Society. He is a member of American Academy for Arts and Sciences as well as Science Council of Japan.