Gerald B. Cleaver[1] is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Baylor University[2] and is Head of the Early Universe Cosmology and Strings (EUCOS)[3] division of Baylor's Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics & Engineering Research (CASPER) [4]. His research specialty is string phenomenology and string model building [5]. John H. Schwarz, one of the founders of string theory, was Cleaver's Ph.D. thesis advisor at Caltech. While a postdoc at Texas A&M University working with Dimitri Nanopoulos, Cleaver constructed the first string-derived model containing only the particles of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) in the observable sector [6]. At Baylor University Cleaver has constructed the first string derived Near-MSSM [7] possessing the potential to resolve the factor-of-20 difference between the MSSM unification scale of 2.5×1025 eV (25 YeV or 4.0 MJ) and the weakly coupled heterotic string scale of 5×1026 eV (500 YeV or 80 MJ) via a robust method referred to as "optical unification".
