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 master's degree student at UCLA, after which I returned to London to begin doctoral studies 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 there turned into a twenty-five year exciting and rewarding association with Illinois.
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 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, in a house that was rather too yellow on the outside and rather too cluttered with books and toys on the inside, but otherwise was wonderful. And for ten more years we lived just a few blocks away, on Pennsylvania Avenue, where we succeeded in ensuring that this home, too, became thoroughly cluttered with books and toys.
In 2011 we said a fond farewell to our Urbana “family,” and embarked on our Southern adventure, moving to Atlanta, Georgia, drawn there by a wish for city living and the warmth of the winters, the topography of the surrounding countryside, and of course the opportunities presented by Georgia Tech, where Jenny and I are fortunate to be members of the faculty. We are also fortunate that Oliver is a graduate of Georgia Tech, having majored in Computer Science, and now works for a startup company, StockX, in Detroit, Michigan, and that Greta is an undergraduate at Emory University, here in Atlanta, where she is majoring in Creative Writing.