Vishnumohan "Vishnu" Jejjala (born January 15, 1975) is an Indian-American physicist who specializes in string theory. [1] [2]
Jejjala was born in Coimbatore, India. His family moved to the United States in 1980. Jejjala earned Bachelor of Science degrees in physics, mathematics, and astronomy from University of Maryland at College Park in 1996. He earned a Master of Science and Ph.D. in physics in 2002 from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He did postdoctoral work at Virginia Tech from 2002 to 2004, Durham University from 2004 to 2007, and Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 2007 to 2009. Since 2009, he has been at Queen Mary, University of London.
Edward Witten is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.
Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory as a viable scientific theory. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.
Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He is also a regular contributor to his own blog, as well as other popular media outlets. For his efforts to bridge science and science fiction, he is a 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Awardee.
Brian Randolph Greene is a leading American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 1990–1995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds. He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
Michael James Duff FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and pioneering theorist of supergravity who is the Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.
Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.
Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. He is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, India and also a Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize "for opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".
Michael Boris Green is a British physicist and a pioneer of string theory. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, emeritus professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 2009 to 2015.
John David Barrow was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician. He served as Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2008 to 2011. Barrow was also a writer of popular science and an amateur playwright.
Peter Woit is an American theoretical physicist. He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book Not Even Wrong (2006) and writes a blog of the same name.
Gabriele Veneziano is an Italian theoretical physicist widely considered the father of string theory. He has conducted most of his scientific activities at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and held the Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the Collège de France in Paris from 2004 to 2013, until the age of retirement there.
Jonathan Richard Ellis is a British theoretical physicist who is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London.
Emil John Martinec is an American string theorist, a physics professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and director of the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics. He was part of a group at Princeton University that developed heterotic string theory in 1985.
Clifford Victor Johnson is an English theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Southern California Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Shahn Majid is an English pure mathematician and theoretical physicist, trained at Cambridge University and Harvard University and, since 2001, a Professor of Mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.
Matthias Staudacher is a German theoretical physicist who has done significant work in the area of quantum field theory.
Vlatko Vedral is a Serbian-born physicist and Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is known for his research on the theory of Entanglement and Quantum Information Theory. As of 2017 he has published over 280 research papers in quantum mechanics and quantum information and was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007. He has held a Lectureship and Readership at Imperial College, a Professorship at Leeds and visiting professorships in Vienna, Singapore (NUS) and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. As of 2017 there are over 18,000 citations of Vedral's research papers. He is the author of several books, including Decoding Reality.
Sumit Ranjan Das is a US-based Indian high energy physicist and a Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Known for his research on string theory, Das is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1998.
Ginestra Bianconi is a network scientist and mathematical physicist, known for her work on statistical mechanics, network theory, and multilayer networks, and in particular for the Bianconi–Barabási model of growing of complex networks and for the Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. She is a professor of applied mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Physics: Complexity.