Andrew Strominger

Strominger was born on July 30, 1955, in England.⁠[1]

His father is the Harvard scientist Jack Strominger and his mother was named Ann; he has recalled how happy and excited his father was about his work when he was a child.⁠[2]

He received a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1977 and an M.A. in physics from UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry in 1979.⁠[1]

He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1982.⁠[3]

From 1982 to 1987 he was a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study in PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, and he was a trustee there from 2002 to 2008.⁠[1]

With P. Candelas, Gary T. Horowitz and Edward Witten he published “Vacuum configurations for superstrings” in Nuclear Physics B, studying ten-dimensional superstring vacua that preserve N=1 supersymmetry in four dimensions, one of which yields a four-dimensional model with an E6 gauge group and four generations of fermions.⁠[4]

With Cumrun Vafa he published “Microscopic Origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy,” deriving the Bekenstein–Hawking area–entropy relation for a class of five-dimensional extremal black holes by counting the degeneracy of BPS soliton bound states in string theory.⁠[5]

A faculty member in the physics department at UC Santa Barbara, he moved to Harvard in 1997.⁠[3]

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 in physics.⁠[6]

In 2012–2013 he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, studying the laws governing event horizons, which surround a black hole or a region of the universe receding faster than light.⁠[3]

In August 2014 ICTP announced that he would share the Dirac Medal with Ashoke Sen and Gabriele Veneziano for crucial contributions to the origin, development and understanding of string theory, describing him as a major figure in uncovering geometric solutions of string theory.⁠[7]

That year he was invited to give the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture in Stockholm on November 19 and receive the Oskar Klein Medal.⁠[8]

Harvard’s interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative was established in 2016, initially funded entirely by the John Templeton Foundation, and he is one of its key researchers.⁠[9]

The American Physical Society awarded him the 2016 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics for leadership in string theory, quantum field theory and quantum geometry, especially for elucidating the microscopic origin of black hole entropy.⁠[10]

With Stephen W. Hawking and Malcolm J. Perry he published “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” arguing that black holes carry large amounts of soft supertranslation hair made of soft gravitons or photons, with complete information about their quantum state stored on a holographic plate at the future boundary of the horizon.⁠[11]

He shared the $3 million 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Cumrun Vafa and Joseph Polchinski; he said that those recognized with prizes were “merely the first to arrive.”⁠[12]

Princeton University Press published his Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory, based on a course he taught at Harvard, which introduces the equivalence among soft theorems, asymptotic symmetries and the memory effect.⁠[13]

When his father, Jack Strominger, announced his retirement, he said his father still perks up and gets excited about his work.⁠[2]

With Daniel Kapec and Alexandru Lupsasca he published “Photon Rings Around Warped Black Holes,” using a geometry approximating the near-extremal Kerr black hole to study the photon ring, quasinormal modes and their holographic interpretation, the photon ring being a prime target for future space-based VLBI missions.⁠[14]

He appeared as the guest of episode 359 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing black holes, Albert Einstein, quantum gravity, string theory, the holographic principle, the black hole information paradox, soft particles and photon rings.⁠[15]

The Simons Foundation announced the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography, directed by him, which seeks to realize the holographic principle in nearly asymptotically flat spacetimes like our own.⁠[16]

His research also includes finding a precise mathematical relation between the Navier–Stokes and Einstein equations, showing that horizons evolve like incompressible fluids, and finding a near-horizon conformal symmetry for rapidly spinning black holes.⁠[17]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Black Hole Initiative: Official website: https://bhi.fas.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]