João Penedones

João Miguel Augusto Penedones Fernandes is a Portuguese theoretical physicist who has done significant work in the area of quantum field theory. He is currently a tenure track professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

One of his most important contributions is a conjecture about the conditions upon which a conformal field theory has a gravity dual, later proved by A. Liam Fitzpatrick and Jared Kaplan.

Correlation functions of local operators living on the boundary of AdS are the natural analogues of scattering amplitudes. This connection is made more manifest once the correlation function is expressed in terms of Mellin amplitudes as suggested by Penedones.