Cornish, 12, with his possum, Ginny. Photo courtesy of Neil Cornish.

His parents, the Australian night sky and resolving the ever-present mechanical problems on the farm, provided the mixture that probably set Cornish on his life's course. Astronomy was an early interest.

"It's been something pretty important as long as I can remember," Cornish said.

Cornish's parents, now divorced, were academics in England when they decided to raise sheep in the foothills of the Grampian Mountains in southeast Australia. Neil's father, an entomologist, had always wanted to farm. Jean Cornish, in her 20s then with a doctorate in pharmaceutics, was up for an adventure. With their oldest daughter and 6-month-old Neil, they moved to Australia. Their house sat at the end of a mile-long lane and about 15 miles from the closest town.

"We went to Australia thinking we may or may not have stayed," said Jean, a university professor in Australia who is now a research fellow at MSU. "But we just fell in love with it. It was tremendously welcoming, and we never looked back."

She saw Cornish's early interest in the universe, but stargazing was a hobby he shared with the rest of the family. She remembers lying outside on a wooden bench, looking up at the sky. She recalls waking her son to watch Halley's comet.

When Neil lived on the farm, he rode horses, helped with lambing, fixed a lot of fences, assisted sheep shearers, and worked construction. He trapped rabbits to earn money for a motorbike. After a baby possum ran up his pant leg and settled on his head, he kept it as a pet.

"He was very much a bush boy," Jean said.

As Neil grew, Jean and her husband realized he was good in math, computers and sciences and needed something more challenging than the local school. So when he was 15 or 16 years old, they sent him to a boarding school in Melbourne, four hours away from the farm. He took his first calculus class as an 11th grader and found it to be refreshingly logical. The door to physics and astrophysics had opened.

"All of a sudden, I didn't have to memorize everything," Cornish explained. "Everything became inter-related and it all made sense. One key unlocked all these doors. Physics was really easy for me. I could derive things."

"I expected Neil to end up with a career in science-physics, maths, computers-something along that line," Jean said. "When he got to the university, it was clear he was going places, but I did not know where."

That realization and his academic standing led Cornish to take advanced physics courses at the University of Melbourne. Cornish earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, then received his doctorate at Toronto. He went on to do postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, where he spent two years in a group with Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist disabled by Lou Gehrig's disease. Cornish did more postdoctoral work at Princeton University and then joined the MSU faculty in 1999.

"He was seduced by Bozeman," said Jean, who had the same reaction when she came to visit. "I was surprised. Montana seemed like a funny place to be doing physics. A place like Bozeman seemed even funnier. But I later found out they had a very good physics department here."

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