Hirosi Ooguri

Hirosi Ooguri
Born	1962 Gifu Prefecture
Nationality	Japanese
Alma mater	Kyoto University
Awards	Leonard Eisenbud Prize　 Humboldt Research Award Nishina Memorial Prize American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical Physics
Institutions	California Institute of Technology

Hirosi Ooguri (spelled as Hiroshi Oguri in government documents^[1]) (大栗 博司, born 1962) is a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading theorist in high energy physics and works at the interface of elementary particle physics, string theory, and related mathematics.

Hirosi Ooguri discovers hidden geometric and algebraic structures in quantum field theory and superstring theory, and exploits them to invent new theoretical tools to investigate these theories. In particular, he developed the topological string theory to compute Feynman diagrams in superstring theory and used it to solve mysterious quantum mechanical properties of black holes. He also made fundamental contributions to conformal field theories in two dimensions, D-branes in Calabi-Yau manifolds, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and properties of supersymmetric gauge theories and their relations to superstring theory.^[2]

Career

Hirosi Ooguri is Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics^[3] and the Founding Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology. He is also the President of the Aspen Center for Physics and a Principal Investigator of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics at the University of Tokyo.

He is a leading theorist in elementary particle physics and its interface with mathematics. Finishing his graduate study in 2 years, Ooguri became a tenured faculty member at the University of Tokyo at the age of 24. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and appointed an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1989. He was an Associate Professor at Kyoto University in 1991 - 1994 and returned to the United States as the youngest Full Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994.^[4] In 1996, as appointed a Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2000, Ooguri moved to Caltech, where he holds the Fred Kavli Professorship.

At Caltech, Ooguri served as the Deputy Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (equivalent of Vice Dean of Physical Sciences) in 2010 - 2015. He led the establishment of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics and was appointed its Founding Director in 2014.

In 2007, he helped establish the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo, where he is a principal investigator. He has been a member of the Aspen Center for Physics since 2003 and was elected its President in 2016.

Ooguri is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Simons Investigator of the Simons Foundation, and received the Eisenbud Prize from the American Mathematical Society, the Humboldt Research Award and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. Ooguri’s popular science books have sold over a quarter million copies in Japan and his science movie received the Best Educational Production Award from the International Planetarium Society.

Awards

• Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics, awarded by the American Mathematical Society (2008).^[5] This was the inaugural prize, which he shared with Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa.
• Takagi Lecturer, the only named lecture series of the Mathematical Society of Japan (2008).^[6]
• Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2009).
• Nishina Memorial Prize from the Nishina Foundation (2009).
• Simons Investigator Award (2012).
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012.^[7]
• Kodansha Prize for Science books (2013).
• Chunichi Cultural Prize (2016).
• Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics (2018) ^[8]
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other activities

Ooguri has organized many international conferences and workshops, including Strings `98 in Santa Barbara,^[9] Strings 2003 in Kyoto,^[10] and Strings 2018 in Okinawa.

Ooguri has been on the editorial boards of Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Journal of High Energy Physics (1997–2006), Nuclear Physics B (1998 - 2013), Physical Review D (2006–2009) and Communications in Mathematical Physics (2014 - 2015). He has also served on various boards and advisory committees.

References

External links

• Official Website