Quick Facts
Biography
Hirosi Ooguri (大栗 博司, spelled as "Hiroshi Oguri" in government documents, 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.
Career
Hirosi Ooguri is Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics 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 at Kyoto University, 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 before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. He held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and Kyoto University, and returned to the United States as the youngest Full Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. In 1996, as appointed a Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In 2000, Ooguri moved Caltech, his current home institution. 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 and the Humboldt Research Award. Ooguri’s popular science books have sold over a quarter million copies in Japan and a 3D science movie he supervised 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). 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).
- 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.
- Kodansha Prize for Science books (2013).
- Chunichi Cultural Prize (2016).
- 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, Strings 2003 in Kyoto, 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.