Kenneth Bloom is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  His first encounter with physics came in 1979, when Barbara Wolff-Reichert had to find a way to engage a class of elementary school students.  After serving as captain of the Columbia High School physics team, Bloom earned degrees in physics from the University of Chicago and Cornell University.  He is an experimental particle physicist by trade, with interests in the top quark, the Higgs boson, and their interactions.  He also has a long-running interest in software and computing issues for particle physics experiments, which produce multi-petabyte data samples.  Bloom is Deputy Manager of the U.S. CMS Operations Program, where he manages U.S. contributions to the maintenance and operations of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.  In that role he is the principal investigator of a $51M award from the National Science Foundation that supports that agency’s contributions to the experiment.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a previous recipient of an NSF Early Career Development Award.  Bloom has taught advanced laboratory a number of times and is still trying to decide if the experience was statistically significant.