Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science

Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science is sponsored by Simons Foundation. This program supports outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, particularly those establishing creative new research directions and providing leadership in fields such as quantum optics.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience. Mathematics & Physical Sciences Mathematics & Physical Sciences Simons Investigators are outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions.

The Investigator program has been discontinued.

Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science The intent of the Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics and Computer Science programs is to support outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.

A Simons Investigator is appointed for an initial period of five years. Renewal for an additional five years is contingent upon the evaluation of scientific impact of the Investigator. Simons Investigators in Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems (MMLS) This program aims to help the research careers of outstanding scientists working on mathematical and theoretical approaches to topics in the life sciences.

A Simons Investigator in MMLS is appointed for five years. This program encourages novel collaborations between mathematics and other fields in science or engineering by providing funds to professors to establish programs at the interface between mathematics and other fields of science or engineering. A Math+X Investigator is appointed for an initial period of five years.

Renewal for an additional five years is contingent upon the evaluation of scientific impact of the Investigator. Aaron Naber is a geometric analyst working on the regularity, singularity and topology of geometrically motivated equations.

Naber has proved, together with collaborators, the rectifiable structure for singularities of geometric equations, including nonlinear harmonic maps, minimal hypersurfaces and spaces with lower Ricci bounds. This direction of analysis has led to the resolution of several open problems and conjectures, including the energy identity for Yang Mills and the L2 curvature conjecture.

In another direction, Naber has settled, together with coworkers, a variety of open problem on spaces with lower Ricci bounds, including the codimension four conjecture and the Milnor conjecture. Davesh Maulik works in algebraic geometry, with an emphasis on the geometry of moduli spaces. In many cases, this involves using ideas from neighboring fields such as mathematical physics, symplectic geometry and representation theory.

His most recent work has focused on moduli spaces of Higgs bundles and various conjectures regarding their structure. Jacob Tsimerman is a number theorist working at the intersection of analytic number theory, algebraic geometry and Hodge theory.

Much of his work has been on the subject of ‘unlikely intersections,’ which is a web of finiteness conjectures asserting that rational solutions should only exist for geometrically motivated reasons. With collaborators, he has recently proven the André-Oort conjecture.

Tsimerman’s other work has included applying the methods of logic via o-minimality to Hodge theory, resulting in the development of powerful new methods and a proof of the Griffiths conjecture. Vlad Vicol works in the field of nonlinear PDEs, focusing on models arising in fluid dynamics.

His main contributions concern the regularity of critical active scalar equations, the vanishing viscosity limit in the presence of boundaries, the construction of turbulent weak solutions for both Euler and Navier-Stokes, and the analysis of multi-dimensional shock waves. Emanuele Berti is a theorist whose research interests include black holes, neutron stars, gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysical tests of general relativity.

He has worked on various topics in gravitational-wave science, including black hole quasinormal modes, higher multipole radiation and spin precession in binary systems, astrophysical scenarios for the formation and evolution of compact binaries, and modified theories of gravity. Berti is contributing to the development of the science case for the space-based detector LISA and for next-generation ground-based detectors.

Aram Harrow studies quantum computing and information. He works to understand the capabilities of the quantum computers and quantum communication devices we will build in the future, and in the process, he creates connections to other areas of theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.

He has developed quantum algorithms for solving large systems of linear equations and hybrid classical-quantum algorithms for machine learning. Harrow has also contributed to the intersection of quantum information and many-body physics, with work on thermalization, random quantum dynamics and the “monogamy” property of quantum entanglement.

The research of Daniel Jafferis spans many areas of quantum gravity, string theory and quantum field theory.

Current directions include understanding bulk observables in holography and extracting lessons for de Sitter spacetime, precisely formulating the statistical ensembles encoding the pseudo-random aspect of chaotic conformal field theories, understanding entanglement entropy in string theory, finding physically realizable quantum systems that exhibit features of emergent gravity, and formulating and resolving the overcounting problem of semi-classical black hole microstates.

The overarching goal is to find the full formulation of the laws of physics, in particular the fundamental framework that describes quantum gravity in an expanding universe. David Kaplan is a theoretical physicist proposing extensions to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology and finding new ways to test them experimentally.

He has discovered models of a naturally small cosmological constant and Higgs mass, classical solutions for firewalls in general relativity, and causal modifications of quantum mechanics. He has also found testable models of dark matter, dark energy and dark radiation.

He has proposed algorithms to discover both heavy and long-lived particles at colliders, as well as techniques for discovering dark matter and new elementary forces using new technologies in novel ways. Norman Yao’s research combines ideas from atomic physics, condensed matter and quantum information, with a focus on proposing laboratory realizations of novel strongly-correlated phenomena.

He is known for his work on non-equilibrium phases of matter, ranging from time crystals to Floquet topological phases. Yao’s recent work has contributed to our understanding of ergodicity in many-particle classical and quantum systems, as well as strategies to avoid this fate.

With collaborators, he introduced new ways to characterize topological phases, many-body quantum teleportation and entanglement dynamics in a wide array of quantum simulation platforms.

Ruth Baker’s research develops and draws together concepts from a number of fields, including statistical physics, multiscale modelling, stochastic processes, computational statistics and machine learning, to provide novel insights into the mechanisms governing cell and developmental biology phenomena.

She works in close collaboration with experimental researchers to iteratively test and refine novel mechanistic hypotheses using repeated rounds of model development, calibration and refinement. In turn, the biological problems she studies drive the development of new theory and methodologies. Leonid Mirny combines biophysical modeling with analysis of large genomics data to address fundamental problems in biology.

Mirny aims to understand how long DNA molecules of chromosomes are folded in 3D, and how this 3D organization is used by living cells. The Mirny group has proposed that DNA is folded by molecular motors that perform “loop extrusion. ” The loop extrusion hypothesis has been confirmed experimentally and has revolutionized our understanding of chromosomes across all organisms.

Now, Mirny aims to understand how cells use this and other physical mechanisms to regulate its genes, repair DNA and maintain epigenetic memory. Eugene Chiang is a theorist with interests in all things planetary. He has worked on proto-planetary disks, post-planetary debris disks, orbital dynamics and planetary atmospheres.

A current focus is determining the properties of planets still accreting from their parent disks, to help interpret observations and place planet formation on an empirical footing. Phil Hopkins is a theoretical astrophysicist working on a range of problems including galaxies, stars, planets, dark matter and black holes.

He has pioneered development of novel high-resolution numerical computational simulations to study complex multi-physics astrophysical systems, in particular those where microphysical and macroscopic astrophysical scales are strongly-coupled.

His group has played a crucial role in constraining and testing different dark matter models, understanding the origins and nature of super-massive black holes and quasars, explaining why stars and galaxies have the masses and structure we observe, and exploring the physics of relativistic particles in interstellar gas.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan’s research is in the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data, as well as lattice-based cryptography, which lays down a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world.

Recently, he has been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning. Santosh Vempala has made fundamental advances in the theory of algorithms: for sampling high-dimensional distributions, computing the volume of a convex body, optimization over convex sets, randomized matrix approximation, as well as basic problems in machine learning.

In many cases, these were the first polynomial-time algorithms and co-evolved with insights into high-dimensional geometry and probability.

Recent highlights include proving that sufficiently sparse linear systems can be solved faster than matrix multiplication (Ax=b, the workhorse of modern computation); extending sampling methods to non-Euclidean (Riemannian) geometries to make them faster (leading to practical methods in very high dimension); pioneering techniques for algorithmic robust statistics (immune to adversarial corruptions); and developing a rigorous theory of computation and learning in the brain in a biologically plausible model (how does the mind emerge from neurons and synapses?)

He continues to be puzzled by whether an unknown polytope can be learned in polytime from samples, whether its diameter is bounded by a polynomial in its description length, whether its volume can be computed in polytime without randomization, and whether the answers to these questions will be discovered by humans or by AI.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams' research is broadly in theoretical computer science, and more specifically in designing algorithms for graphs and matrices, and uncovering formal relationships between seemingly very different computational problems.

She is known for her work on fast matrix multiplication, both in co-developing the world's fastest algorithm and in proving limitations on the known techniques for designing matrix multiplication algorithms. Williams is also one of the original founders and leaders of fine-grained complexity, a blossoming new branch of computational complexity.

Ivan Corwin works at the interface of probability and mathematical physics with a particular interest in exactly solvable probabilistic models and stochastic partial differential equations. Much of his work has focused around the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation and its universality class.

Nick Sheridan's work centers around Kontsevich's homological mirror symmetry conjecture, which posits a deep relationship between symplectic topology and algebraic geometry. Working mainly on the symplectic side, he has developed tools for proving the conjecture and applied them to prove the conjecture in a number of cases, most notably the quintic threefold.

In cases where the conjecture is established, Sheridan has given applications to enumerative geometry and symplectic topology. Wei Zhang is a number theorist working on automorphic representations and arithmetic geometry. He studies special values of zeta and L-functions and their relation to periods and heights of algebraic cycles on moduli spaces over global fields.

A focus of his research is various high-dimensional generalizations of the Gross-Zagier formula. In particular, Zhang proposed the relative trace formula approach, which has led to many new deep questions relating the harmonic analysis on spaces with a group action over local fields to the arithmetic intersection theory on local Shimura varieties.

Chenyang Xu works in algebraic geometry, with an emphasis on understanding the structure of higher dimensional algebraic varieties. With his collaborators, Xu led the establishment of a rich algebraic K-stability theory for Fano varieties, crowned by the novel construction of projective K-moduli spaces parametrizing Fano varieties.

The new algebraic method invented by Xu and his collaborators, largely built on the minimal model program in birational geometry, also provides a solution to the algebraic Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture for all Fano varieties, and a radically new singularity theory. Ehud Altman studies quantum many-body phenomena in condensed matter and quantum information systems.

He is known for introducing dynamical renormalization group methods to describe many-body localization and for establishing the nature of large-scale fluctuations in exciton-polariton condensates. Altman’s recent work has contributed to elucidating the role of quantum information, entanglement and chaos in the dynamics of many-body systems.

With collaborators, he introduced the notion of Krylov complexity as a holographic-like principle for quantum operator growth in generic systems and helped to understand information phase transitions in quantum circuits using tools from field theory and statistical mechanics.

Michael Levin’s research combines ideas from condensed matter physics, quantum information and mathematics with a focus on the theory of topological phases of matter. In one line of research, he has constructed exactly solvable lattice models that realize a general class of two-dimensional strongly interacting topological phases. These lattice models have become a useful theoretical tool for studying anyons.

He has also introduced a way to probe topological phases using entanglement entropy, which has given rise to new numerical methods. Recently, Levin has made contributions to the theory of the bulk-boundary correspondence for topological matter, both in equilibrium and in periodically driven systems. Mariangela Lisanti is a theoretical astroparticle physicist studying the nature of dark matter.

Her research is interdisciplinary and often involves application of novel data science techniques or collaborations with experimentalists and observers. Lisanti helped to pioneer the use of simplified models in Large Hadron Collider searches, proposed new directions for dark matter experiments and developed original analysis methods for studying dark matter annihilation in gamma rays.

Most recently, Lisanti has been harnessing data from astrophysical surveys to probe the fundamental nature of dark matter and map its distribution in the Milky Way. Douglas Stanford works on quantum gravity and its connection to quantum mechanics, mainly in the context of simple toy models of black holes.

He and his collaborators showed that black holes exhibit the butterfly effect and used this as a starting point to explore chaos in quantum many-body systems. Stanford’s recent work has focused on aspects of black holes that appear in tension with the rules of ordinary quantum mechanics and, in particular, on the search for spacetime effects that can resolve the tension.

Jesse Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who fuses techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address questions in fundamental physics. His current research focuses on maximizing the discovery potential of the Large Hadron Collider through new theoretical frameworks and novel data analysis techniques.

Thaler is an expert in jets, which are collimated sprays of particles copiously produced at colliders, and he studies the substructure of jets to enhance the search for new phenomena and illuminate the dynamics of gauge theories. Olga Dudko is a theoretical physicist who explores the phenomena of the living world. Her research is driven by the notion that deep, physics-based conceptual approaches can encompass living-system complexity.

The theory of single-molecule force spectroscopy developed by Dudko and collaborators has been widely used for extracting activation energies and rate constants from experiments on conformational transitions in biological macromolecules. Recent areas of research include the spatiotemporal organization of chromosomes, virus-host cell interactions and neuronal communication.

Dudko’s research strives for a unifying understanding of disparate biological processes through analytically tractable theories that reveal unifying principles and are predictive in experiments. Joshua Weitz explores how viruses transform the fate of cells, individuals, populations and ecosystems.

In collaboration with experimentalists, his research in viral ecology has revealed latent structures of virus-host infection networks, identified principles underlying the therapeutic use of viruses against bacterial pathogens and shown how repeated infections catalyze the diversification of complex virus-microbe communities.

Weitz's recent and ongoing work on pandemic dynamics examines how behavior change and asymptomatic spread shape outbreaks and can be used to inform data-driven interventions. Alex Schekochihin is interested in the fundamental nature and practical implications of turbulence in plasmas.

His main contributions have concerned the physics of turbulent dynamo (believed responsible for much of the observed cosmic magnetism), the free-energy cascade and the interplay between microscale instabilities and mesoscale dynamics in astrophysical plasmas from galaxy clusters to solar wind, and mechanisms for “phase transitions” between low- and high-transport states in fusion devices.

Recently, Schekochihin proposed a theory of fluidization of collisionless plasma turbulence, owing to suppression of Landau damping by stochastic echoes. This has led to his ongoing interest in the general problem of turbulent relaxation and universal equilibria in collisionless plasmas.

Tracy Slatyer is a theoretical physicist working at the interface of particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics, seeking clues to the mystery of dark matter in astrophysical and cosmological data. She was a co-discoverer of the giant gamma-ray structures known as the “Fermi Bubbles” and has done influential work on new theories of dark matter and possible effects of dark matter interactions from the early universe to the present day.

Shayan Oveis Gharan’s research exploits deep tools from mathematics, such as the theory of real stable and log-concave polynomials, spectral graph theory and high-dimensional simplicial complexes to design and analyze algorithms for discrete objects.

He is known for his results on improved approximation algorithms for classical optimization problems such as traveling salesperson problems, as well as his analysis of the mixing time of Markov chains to efficiently sample from complex probability distributions such as the uniform distribution over the bases of a matroid. Shachar Lovett works broadly in theoretical computer science and related mathematics.

He focuses on the study of structure and randomness, and how they are pivotal to our understanding of efficient computation. One facet of Lovett’s work is discovering the mathematical structures that underlie efficient computation, such as combinatorial structure in complexity theory, geometric structure in machine learning and algebraic structure in coding theory. Another facet is understanding the power of randomness in computation.

Structure and randomness can be seen as complementary, and Lovett’s work aims to identify the fracture lines between structure and randomness, towards a better understanding of computation. Gregory Valiant works at the intersection of algorithms, information theory, learning and statistics to understand how to extract as much information as possible from data in various fundamental settings.

What information can be inferred if the amount of data is sublinear in the support size or dimensionality of the distribution in question? How do restrictions on the amount of available memory affect the time or amount of data required to learn or optimize? Can we make learning and estimation algorithms robust to outlying training data or settings where the test and training sets are dissimilar?

Guido De Philippis works in geometric measure theory, calculus of variations and partial differential equations. His main interest is the understanding of regularity (or lack thereof) of solutions of geometric variational problems, ranging from minimal surfaces to free boundary problems.

Recently, in collaboration with Filip Rindler, he obtained a fine description of the structure of the singular part of measures satisfying a linear partial differential equation (PDE) constraint.

By suitably choosing the PDE constriction, the result allowed a number of open questions to be solved: extension of Alberti’s rank-one theorem to the space of bounded deformation (BD) functions, converse of the Rademacher theorem and structure of Lipschitz differentiability spaces. June Huh studies discrete objects using geometric methods.

An unexpected relation between combinatorics and algebraic geometry found by Huh was used in his proof of Read's conjecture in graph theory. In recent works, he and his collaborators proposed a more general framework that tightens the connection between the two seemingly disparate fields.

This led to proofs of several other long-standing problems in combinatorics, such as the ultra-log-concavity conjecture of Mason and the top-heavy conjecture of Dowling–Wilson. Lin Lin is an applied mathematician working in electronic structure theory.

With collaborators, he has developed efficient, accurate and scalable algorithms in Kohn–Sham density functional theory, localization theory, many-body perturbation theory and quantum embedding theory. Several new methods have been adopted by electronic structure software packages widely used in quantum chemistry, quantum physics and materials science.

Recently, Lin has contributed to neural network-based methods for accelerating molecular simulations, as well as quantum algorithms for solving high-dimensional linear algebra problems with applications to electronic structure calculations.

Assaf Naor’s research focuses on analysis and geometry in high dimensions, with emphasis on understanding the structure of metric spaces, including the extent to which they can be realized in “nicer” geometries.

He harnesses such insights for a variety of applications in several areas of pure mathematics (analysis, geometry, probability, combinatorics, group theory), and also in order to chart the possibilities and limitations of algorithms.

Much of Naor’s work makes progress on the long-standing Ribe program, which is a web of conjectures and analogies between linear and nonlinear geometries that is inspired by a classical rigidity theorem of Ribe. Xie Chen studies exotic topological phenomena that can emerge in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems.

Her work uses ideas and tools in quantum information to explore topological states of matter and study the relationships between them. She discovered and systematically constructed symmetry-protected topological phases in strongly interacting systems in two and higher dimensions. She proposed methods to classify and detect anomalies in symmetry-enriched topological phases.

Recently, Chen’s work on fracton phases generalized the notion of phase and universality to properly capture the unusual “beyond topology” phenomena discovered in certain quantum error-correction codes. Shanhui Fan works broadly on photonics theory.

Fan has made fundamental contributions in temporal coupled mode theory, non-reciprocity as induced by dynamic modulation, photonic gauge potentials, waveguide quantum electrodynamics, solar cell light trapping theory and daytime radiative cooling. Recently, he has been working on concepts of synthetic dimensions as a way to explore Hermitian and non-Hermitian topological physics in photonics.

Peter Graham is interested in the fundamental laws of nature. Motivated by long-standing mysteries in particle physics and cosmology such as the weakness of gravity and the nature of dark matter, he proposed several new theories for these open questions. Additionally, he helped pioneer the use of ultrahigh-precision technologies for experimentally probing these questions.

With experimental colleagues, he proposed novel approaches for detecting dark matter, new forces and gravitational waves. This gave rise to experiments using techniques from atomic physics, nuclear magnetic resonance and quantum information which are poised to shed new light on our universe. Surjeet Rajendran has invented new experimental methods to detect gravitational waves, dark matter and dark energy.

These methods are being implemented by many laboratories around the world. He has also developed theoretical tools to solve outstanding problems of particle physics such as the hierarchy and vacuum energy problems via cosmological evolution.

His recent theoretical interests have been in identifying novel gravitational phenomena within general relativity, permitting new experimentally testable approaches to resolving cosmological singularities and solutions to the black hole information problem. L. Mahadevan is a professor of applied mathematics, physics, and organismic and evolutionary biology.

His work attempts to understand motion and matter at the observable scale of “middle earth” by integrating experiments, theory and computation. Areas of interest include the patterns of shape and flow of inanimate matter and the dynamics of sentient living matter that can self-organize, perceive and act.

His publications range over subjects such as the geometry and physics of soft materials, the mathematics of origami and kirigami, the morphodynamics of cells and organs, and the ethology of collective behavior. Mahadevan is a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Ilya Nemenman, in close collaboration with experimentalists, works on theoretical understanding of biological information processing, aiming to build models that show physics-level precision in agreeing with experimental data.

He and his collaborators were some of the first groups to estimate information-theoretic channel capacity of protein signaling pathways, analyze statistical properties of activity of large genetic and neural networks, discover collective cellular sensing in development, decode high-precision timing codes in neural motor control, and model dynamics of complex animal behavior, such as a bird learning its song.

Jonathan Fortney models many aspects of the physics of planets, from rocky worlds to gas giants. His work in planetary theory focuses both on exoplanets that orbit distant stars as well as planets in the solar system. His models have provided a framework to understand the atmospheres of exoplanets, their interior structure and thermal evolution, as well as physical processes like helium “rain” deep within Saturn.

Fortney often works closely with observers to interpret spectra of exoplanets to better understand their physics, chemistry and clues to their formation. Yuri Levin works on astrophysics of neutron stars, black holes and gravitational waves.

He is known for computations of thermal and quantum noise in LIGO interferometers, for co-discovering a disc of massive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for developing gravitational-wave search algorithms for pulsar timing arrays, and for his work on the dynamics of magnetized neutron stars.

Levin is currently attempting to understand the architecture of stellar clusters near supermassive black holes and figure out the origin of pulsar glitches. Maria-Florina Balcan’s research spans machine learning, algorithms and algorithmic game theory.

She introduced general techniques that helped put modern machine-learning paradigms on solid theoretical foundations, including learning from limited labeled data, distributed learning, noise-tolerant learning and life-long learning.

She also provided fundamental contributions to the area of analysis of algorithms beyond the worst-case, by providing both new models of realistic (non worst-case) instances and general techniques for designing and analyzing algorithms derived in a data driven fashion. Amit Sahai’s research proposes fundamental new concepts in cryptography and establishes new feasibility results.

He is best known for his works proposing the notions of indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption, and for his recent work establishing the feasibility of indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption for general computations based on well-studied hardness conjectures. Thomas Vidick’s research is at the interface of theoretical computer science, quantum information and cryptography.

He is known for his work in the theory of quantum interactive proofs, including results on device-independent cryptography, certified randomness and the complexity of quantum multiprover interactive proof systems. The study of quantum entanglement provides a unifying goal behind all these areas and a focal point for his current research. Alexei Borodin is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He studies problems on the interface of representation theory and probability that link to combinatorics, random matrix theory and integrable systems. His most recent work carries over the ideas and techniques of the theory of symmetric functions to solvable lattice models of statistical physics. Ciprian Manolescu works in low-dimensional topology and gauge theory.

His research is centered on constructing new versions of Floer homology and applying them to questions in topology. With collaborators, he showed that many Floer-theoretic invariants are algorithmically computable. He also developed a new variant of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology, which he used to prove the existence of non-triangulable manifolds in high dimensions.

Fernando Codá Marques is a geometer. His recent work, in collaboration with André Neves, developed a full Morse theory for the area functional in closed Riemannian manifolds. The ideas introduced by them have revitalized the subject, leading to the discovery that closed minimal surfaces are ubiquitous in these spaces.

Zhiwei Yun works at the intersection of representation theory, algebraic geometry and number theory. He uses ideas and techniques from geometry to solve problems in group representations and number theory. He has constructed the first examples of motives of type E_7 and E_8 and solved a related inverse Galois problem.

In joint work with Wei Zhang, he has given a geometric interpretation of higher derivatives of L-functions for function fields. Aashish Clerk is a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of condensed matter, quantum optics and quantum information theory. His research focuses on driven-dissipative quantum phenomena and is motivated both by fundamental questions as well as potential applications in quantum technologies.

Clerk is best known for his works on quantum optomechanical systems, on quantum amplification and measurement, and on dissipation engineering to realize unidirectional interactions. Clerk’s current work spans topics ranging from quantum transduction and quantum control to the study of new kinds of driven-dissipative bosonic topological phases and non-Hermitian quantum phenomena.

Claudia de Rham works at the interface between gravity, particle physics and cosmology. She develops and tests new models to tackle fundamental questions of physics, such as the origin and evolution of the Universe, its accelerated expansion and the nature of gravity. She is known for uncovering the first theoretical framework where the graviton could carry a mass with far-reaching implications for cosmology and gravity.

Recently, de Rham has focused on developing consistent effective field theory descriptions of our Universe that may enjoy a standard high-energy completion and on determining new classes of observational signatures. Mohammad Hafezi is known for his contributions in a number of works to synthesize and characterize quantum many-body and topological physics beyond electronic systems.

Examples include cold atoms, superconducting qubits and photons, where his works on the last one have helped found the field of topological photonics. Some of his current interests include efficient characterization and probing of many-body properties in quantum simulators. His research group is interested in exploring the application of quantum optics to create, probe and manipulate correlated electron systems.

Leonardo Rastelli works on a broad range of problems in quantum field theory and string theory. He is known for his contributions to the AdS/CFT correspondence, string field theory, supersymmetric field theories and the conformal bootstrap. He is interested in developing a deeper framework for quantum field theory and quantum gravity, based on symmetry and general consistency principles, in the spirit of the bootstrap.

Kathryn Zurek is a particle theorist who specializes in theories of dark matter and new ideas for how one might detect it, either in terrestrial laboratories or through astrophysical observation. She is known for her proposal of Hidden Valley theories, which highlighted new experimental signatures at the Large Hadron Collider and opened the new paradigm of hidden-sector dark matter.

Zurek also proposed the theory of asymmetric dark matter, which motivates a new class of experiments searching for light dark matter. Recently, she has explored a new direction in experimental signatures of quantum gravity. Jané Kondev uses the tools of theoretical physics to uncover laws that govern the inner workings of cells.

His lab works on the regulation of gene expression, the packing of DNA in cells and the self-organization of the cytoskeleton. One of the