On the Cosmological and Particle Physics Implications of the String Swampland

Cumrun Vafa will seek to find the universal features that distinguish the string landscape from the swampland by studying solutions to string equations. He is particularly interested in exploring consequences of these features that may lead to observable predictions for cosmology. Moreover, he is collaborating with an experimental group in Vienna trying to measure deviations from Newton’s inverse square law at the 10-micron scale.

Cumrun Vafa was appointed a full professor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University in 1990, where he is currently the Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy and the department’s chair. Vafa’s main area of research is string theory at the interface of geometry and physics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and has received many awards, including ICTP’s Dirac Medal, the AMS’s Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics, the APS’s Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.