Tadashi Takayanagi is a professor at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University. After he completed his Ph.D. in Tokyo University in 2002, he worked for four years as a postdoc at Harvard and KITP. He was an assistant professor at Kyoto University and an associate professor in Kavli IPMU, Tokyo University, before he moved to his current position in 2012. He has been awarded the Yukawa-Kimura Prize in 2011, the Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize in 2013 and the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2014.
Takayanagi’s main research contributions have been studies of quantum entanglement by using holography and quantum field theories. In particular, he discovered a holographic formula for entanglement entropy in 2006 with Shinsei Ryu. The main goals of his research are to reconstruct gravity and string theory as a theory of quantum entanglement and to understand dynamical properties of quantum entanglement in quantum field theories.