Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, where he is also on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.

He received his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology and his MA and PhD in Physics at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and Mary Amanda Wood Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where was on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 1998.

He is a Fellow in the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He shared the P.A.M. Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 2002 for his contribution to the development of the inflationary model of the universe; the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2010 for his contribution to the theory of quasicrystals; and the John Scott Award in 2012 for his contributions to both fields. In 2012, he was named Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics; Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard; and Moore Fellow at Caltech.