Lisa Randall

Randall was born on June 18, 1962; her father was a sales representative and her mother a primary schoolteacher.⁠[1]

She comes from a modest family in Queens, New York City.⁠[2]

In 1980 she and John Andersland tied as top winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.⁠[3]

She attended Stuyvesant High School, a New York math and science magnet school, and says she liked mathematics because it had definite answers.⁠[4]

She finished her Harvard undergraduate degree in three years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, then did her doctorate under Howard Georgi; her younger sister, Dana Randall, is a computer science professor at Georgia Tech.⁠[4]

She received a BA in physics from Harvard in 1983 and a PhD in theoretical particle physics in June 1987; she was a President’s Fellow at the University of California, 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 1987–1989, a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1989–1990, and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1990–1991.⁠[5]

She was an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991–1995, associate professor in 1995–1998 and professor of physics in 1998–2001, and was also professor of physics at Princeton UniversityPrinceton 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 in 1998–2000.⁠[1]

She became the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the first tenured female physics theorist at MIT.⁠[4]

On May 4, 1999, she and Raman Sundrum submitted “A Large Mass Hierarchy from a Small Extra Dimension” to arXiv, proposing that the weak scale is generated exponentially by the background metric of a single extra dimension, as a solution to the hierarchy problem; it appeared in Physical Review Letters, volume 83.⁠[6]

On June 8, 1999, the two submitted “An Alternative to Compactification,” arguing that with a non-factorizable background geometry a single 3-brane embedded in five dimensions reproduces four-dimensional Newtonian and general relativistic gravity to more than adequate precision.⁠[7]

From 1999 to 2004 she was the most cited theoretical physicist. She has proposed that our universe may be a three-dimensional “brane” within a higher-dimensional space.⁠[8]

In 2001 she joined the Harvard faculty; she was the first tenured female particle physicist at both MIT and Harvard.⁠[9]

In 2003 she received the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi from the University of Rome La Sapienza, and in 2006 the Klopsteg Award.⁠[10]

In 2004 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[11]

In 2005 she published Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, an account of cutting-edge physics including string theory and extra dimensions, with Allen Lane as the British publisher.⁠[12]

The American Physical Society gave her the 2007 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize for her pioneering work on particle physics and cosmology and for her efforts to engage specialists and nonspecialists through publications and presentations.⁠[13]

The same year she was named to Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list.⁠[14]

In April 2008 she was one of eight Harvard faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[15]

The Creativity Foundation named her its 2009 Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate in the Sciences; receiving the award at the annual Creativity Celebration at the Smithsonian InstitutionSmithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry, she spoke about the role of the creative process in her work.⁠[14]

On June 14, 2009, Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, with her libretto and music by the Catalan composer Hèctor Parra, premiered at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; it was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM, the Centre Pompidou and the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government.⁠[16]

Since July 2009 she has been the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard.⁠[5]

In 2011 HarperCollins published her Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, a 442-page book centred on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that also addresses science and religion.⁠[2]

She describes the book as “in some respects it is two books in one,” covering how scientists measure things and handle uncertainty as well as the LHC experiments and cosmology.⁠[9]

On May 1, 2012, she gave a public talk titled “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” after her latest book, as Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry’s Hans Bethe lecturer that year.⁠[17]

In summer 2012 she released Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space as a Kindle Single, and that year received the American Institute of Physics’s Andrew Gemant Award.⁠[10]

On March 3, 2014, she and Matthew Reece submitted a paper to arXiv proposing that a smooth dark disk in the galactic midplane could perturb Oort cloud comets as the Solar System passes through it, accounting for a possible periodicity of about 35 million years in Earth’s crater record.⁠[18]

In 2015 she published Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, proposing that a disk of unusual dark matter may have sent toward Earth the comet thought to have killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and using the idea to connect chemistry, planetary science and cosmology.⁠[19]

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology gave her the 2015 Julius Wess Award for her pioneering work on theories beyond the Standard Model, in particular the unified description of fundamental forces in models with extra spatial dimensions; the award was presented on July 8, 2016.⁠[11]

In October 2018 it was announced that she and Raman Sundrum would share the American Physical Society’s 2019 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for the discovery that warped extra dimensions can solve the hierarchy puzzle, work with a tremendous impact on searches at the Large Hadron Collider.⁠[20]

In 2019 she received the Oskar Klein Medal and gave the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture, which is sponsored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.⁠[21]

On December 3, 2023, she appeared on episode 403 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 dark matter, extinction events, particle physics and physics versus mathematics.⁠[22]

Her recent research focuses on the Large Hadron Collider and on dark matter searches and models.⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/lirarandall (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

Princeton University: Official website: https://www.princeton.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]