[1][2] Thaler grew up in York, Maine, and attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won the Cox Medal, an award for the top five in the graduating class.
[3] From 1998 to 2002, he pursued a physics major magna cum laude from Brown University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a funk band.
[7][8][9] Thaler focuses on fusing "techniques from QFT and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics.
[5][10][11][12] In addition to his collider physics work, Thaler also helped design a dark matter experiment, ABRACADABRA, that looks for axions and is currently in operation.
[15][16][17] Along with colleague Mike Williams, Thaler also created and co-chairs a new interdisciplinary PhD program in physics, statistics, and data science since 2020.