Caltech is still a good bet. A few years ago I sat next to Hawking at Kip Thorne's 60th birthday party. Even more fun was being seated at the dinner table with Hawking's nurses, who told more than one story I'm not at liberty to repeat on Hacker News. ;-)

I should have mentioned that talking with Hawking himself was fun, but also very, very slow...

... but .... but, infinite karma is within your reach! How can you ignore that? :)

Try MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).

I've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent

Google? YCombinator?