Albion Lawrence is a professor of physics at Brandeis University. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1996 from the University of Chicago, where he did research on string theory and black holes. Lawrence was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University from 1996 to 1999, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1999, and was then a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, Lawrence joined the faculty of the Physics Department at Brandeis as assistant professor of physics. He was promoted to associate professor (with tenure) in 2009, and to professor in 2017. He served as department chair from 2018 to 2021.
Lawrence has worked on a broad range of topics in string theory, quantum gravity, quantum field theory and cosmology. He has done foundational research in holographic duality, in the mathematics of string compactifications and in the interplay between string theory and observational cosmology. He has recently begun doing research in physical oceanography and in geophysical fluid dynamics.