Cumrun Vafa

In 2017, Vafa, alongside Andrew Strominger and Joseph Polchinski, jointly won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their advancement of string theory and jointly won the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Physics Frontiers Prize.

In 2016, Vafa was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

Vafa's research in string theory is focused on the nature of quantum gravity and the relation between geometry and quantum field theories. He is known in the string theory community for his co-discovery with Strominger that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole can be accounted for by solitonic states of superstring theory, and for expounding the relation between geometry and field theories that arise through string dualities (culminating in the Gopakumar–Vafa conjecture). This topic has been known as "geometric engineering of quantum field theories".

He is the recipient of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)'s, 2008 Dirac Medal, which was won alongside Juan Maldacena, and Joseph Polchinski their advancement of string theory.

In 1998 he was a Plenary Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

In 1997, he developed F-theory, a 12-dimensional theory that compactifies to 10-D Type IIB superstring theory.

Vafa worked at Princeton University within the Institute for Advanced Study, within the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Mathematics in 1994.

After his PhD degree, Vafa became a junior fellow via the Harvard Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he later got a junior faculty position. In 1989 he was offered a senior faculty position, and he has been there ever since. Currently, he is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and professor of physics at Harvard University.

He graduated from Alborz High School in Tehran and moved to the United States in 1977 for study at university. He received his undergraduate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a double major in physics and mathematics. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985, under the supervision of Edward Witten.

Cumrun Vafa (Persian: کامران وفا ‎ [kɒːmˈrɒːn væˈfɒː] ; born 1960) is an Iranian-American string theorist and educator, and a professor of physics at Harvard University.

Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran on 1 August 1960. He became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects.