Michael Strickland is a theoretical physicist who specializes in high-energy particle physics, heavy ion collisions, and finite temperature/density quantum field theory. Michael's primary interest is the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). These plasmas are predicted by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to have existed until approximately 10-5 seconds after the big bang and are currently being studied terrestrially by experimentalists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Labs and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These exciting experiments are increasing our knowledge of the behavior of matter under extreme conditions.