Burt Ovrut

Burt Ovrut is an American theoretical physicist most famous for his work on heterotic string theory. He is currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ovrut earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1978. His doctoral advisors were Benjamin W. Lee and Yoichiro Nambu, and his thesis was on an Sp(4) x U(1) Theory of the Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions.
Ovrut is one of those who pioneered the use of M-theory to explain the Big Bang without the presence of a singularity. Recently Burt Ovrut and his collaborators constructed a Calabi-Yau compactification that reproduces the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model without any exotics.