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Renata Kallosh

Professor of Physics, Stanford University

Renata Kallosh is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Physics at Stanford Universtiy. She completed her Bachelors from Moscow State University in 1966 and obtained her PhD from Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow in 1968. She then held a position, as professor, at the same institute, before moving to CERN for a year in 1989. Kallosh joined Stanford in 1990.

Kallosh works on the general structure of supergravityand string theory and their applications to cosmology. During the last few years she was mostly working on the finiteness issue of perturbative maximal supergravity trying to understand the reason for unexpected recent computations showing a better than expected ultraviolet behavior of this theory. She also studies cosmological consequences of supergravity/string theory and their implications for the theory of black holes.

Her main interests are related to the models of vacuum stabilization and early universe inflation in string theory. She develops string theory models explaining the origin of the universe and its current acceleration. With her collaborators, she is analyzing possible consequences of the expected new data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the results of future cosmological observations. These results may affect the relationship between superstring theory and supergravity, and the real world. Professor Kallosh works, in particular, on future tests of string theory by CMB data and on the relation between the gravitino mass and the amplitude of gravitational waves produced during inflation.