As a kid, Benjamin Schumacher gazed at the stars and dreamed of traveling in the vastness of space. Today, the Kenyon professor of physics still contemplates big things, but they come in smaller packages. A widely recognized expert in quantum information theory, he studies how we store and move information in the microscopic world.

He also loves science fiction, which can come in handy in his field. For example, when scientists in Austria pulled off what's called "quantum teleportation" by destroying pieces of light in one place and making perfect replicas appear in another, the media likened it to the "Beam me up, Scotty" process on Star Trek.

Schumacher isn't volunteering to try out teleportation anytime soon. "One of the things that must happen in quantum teleportation is that the original must be totally scrambled," he explains. "And I would be reluctant to step into a machine that was guaranteed to totally scramble my information with just the good hope that my information would be reassembled someplace else."

Schumacher, who earned the Quantum Communication Award, the premier scientific honor in the field, and Kenyon's Robert J. Tomsich Science Award, finds that Kenyon students are well-suited to innovation.

"We have a lot of interesting characters, and Kenyon is a place that tolerates and nourishes unusual people very well," explains Schumacher, who enjoys a good Tom Clancy novel when he's not plowing through physics papers. "I feel like I'm teaching admirable people. It's a great feeling."