Cumrun Vafa, Ph.D.

Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1960. In 1977, he came to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics. He pursued his graduate education at Princeton University and obtained his Ph.D. in physics in 1985 under the direction of Edward Witten. Vafa then became a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He was appointed as 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 a professor of physics. 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 Math and Physics, the APS’s Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.