Vijay Balasubramanian (born 1969) is an American theoretical physicist and the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. He has conducted research in

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...

quantum field theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines Field theory (physics), field theory and the principle of relativity with ideas behind quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct phy ...

, and

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...

(especially theoretical and

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand th ...

). He has also worked on problems in

statistical inference Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

Biography

Born in

Mumbai Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial capital and the most populous city proper of India with an estimated population of 12 ...

, Balasubramanian spent his childhood in major Indian cities like

New Delhi New Delhi (; ) is the Capital city, capital of India and a part of the Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the Government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Parliament ...

Chennai Chennai, also known as Madras (List of renamed places in India#Tamil Nadu, its official name until 1996), is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Tamil Nadu by population, largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost states and ...

Kolkata Kolkata, also known as Calcutta ( its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River, west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary ...

, and

Hyderabad Hyderabad is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part of Southern India. With an average altitude of , much ...

. Among the elementary schools he attended are St. Mary's in Mumbai, St. Xavier’s in Kolkata, and St. Columba’s in New Delhi. His family later moved to

Jakarta Jakarta (; , Betawi language, Betawi: ''Jakartè''), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (; ''DKI Jakarta'') and formerly known as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, Batavia until 1949, is the capital and largest city of Indonesia and ...

, Indonesia, where he attended

Jakarta International School Jakarta Intercultural School (JIS), formerly Jakarta International School, is a private, international school in Jakarta, Indonesia. It was established in 1951 for expatriate students living in Jakarta and is the largest international primary and ...

(JIS). After graduating from JIS, he moved to the United States and attended the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), where he earned B.S. degrees in Physics and Computer Science and an M.S. degree in Computer Science. While a student at MIT, he worked at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

(the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

). For this work at Xerox PARC, he received two patents in

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

. Vijay Balasubramanian completed his doctoral studies at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, where he received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1997 under the supervision of

Curtis Callan Curtis Gove Callan Jr. (born October 11, 1942) is an American theoretical physicist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, inst ...

. He then moved to

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

as a Junior Fellow of the

Harvard Society of Fellows The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intellect ...

. During this time, he was also a fellow-at-large of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inc ...

. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he currently holds the Cathy and Marc Lasry Chair in Physics and where he has a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine, Department of Neuroscience. In 2013, he co-founded th
Computational Neuroscience Initiative at Penn
In October 2021, he was a featured speaker in the

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

documentary series '' Explained'', in the episode on "Time." In 2022, ''Quanta'' ''Magazine'' featured him in an article and video in which he discussed connections between physics, computer science, neurosciences, and humanities fields such as literature. ''Quanta'' described him as a "polymath who is prone to leaping from string theory to Proust in mid-conversation." In 2023, the Catalan-language daily newspaper of

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

, '' Ara'', featured him in an article in which he discussed the relative powers and limits of the human brain and of

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

, and what physics can bring to the study of theoretical and computational neuroscience.

Affiliations

Vijay Balasubramanian has been a research associate and visiting professor at many institutions. These include

Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a Private university, private Medical research, biomedical Research university, research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and pro ...

; the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center; the

École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

(ENS) in Paris, France; the

International Centre for Theoretical Physics The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is a research center for physical and mathematical sciences, located in Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy. The center operates under a tripartite agreement between the Gov ...

(ICTP) in Trieste, Italy; and the

Vrije Universiteit Brussel The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Dutch language, Dutch, ; lit. Free University of Brussels; abbreviated VUB) is a Dutch- and English-speaking research university in Brussels, Belgium. It has four campuses: Brussels Humanities, Science and Engine ...

(VUB) in Brussels, Belgium. In 2007–8, he was a fellow at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

(IAS) (Princeton), supported by an IAS grant from Helen and Martin Chooljian. Since 2011, he has been a General Member of the

Aspen Center for Physics The Aspen Center for Physics (ACP) is a non-profit institution for physics research located in Aspen, Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains region of the United States. Since its foundation in 1962, it has hosted distinguished physicists for short-term ...

in Aspen, Colorado. In 2022, he became an External Professor of the

Honors

Vijay Balasubramanian has won many prizes and fellowships. In 2005, Balasubramanian won first prize in the

Gravity Research Foundation The Gravity Research Foundation is an organization established in 1948 by businessman Roger Babson (founder of Babson College) to find ways to implement gravitational shielding. Over time, the foundation turned away from trying to block gravity ...

essay competition, with his colleagues Don Marolf and Moshe Rozali for an essay on “Information Recovery from Black Holes”. In 2006, he won the Ira H. Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching – the highest teaching award given by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012-13 he won a fellowship from the Fondation

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (; 24 October 1932 – 18 May 2007) was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991. Education and early life He was born in Paris, France, and was home-schooled to the age of 12. By the age of ...

, which he held at the

(ENS) in Paris, France. In 2015, Balasubramanian was part of the international team of string theorists, computer scientists, and quantum information theorists that won a major grant from the

Simons Foundation The Simons Foundation is an American private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and James Harris Simons, Jim Simons with offices in New York City. As one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States with assets of over $5 ...

in New York to investigate the emergence of the fabric of spacetime from information. Their project is entitled
"It from Qubit: Simons Collaboration on Quantum Fields, Gravity, and Information"
In 2019, the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

honored Balasubramanian by recognizing him as a Fellow of the society. His citation as a 2019 APS Fellow noted his "fundamental contributions clarifying the

black hole A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...

information puzzle and black hole thermodynamics through work on the duality of quantum gravity and

, and on black hole microscopics in theories of

quantum gravity Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics. It deals with environments in which neither gravitational nor quantum effects can be ignored, such as in the v ...

Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows

Vijay Balasubramanian's PhD students have include
Minxin Huang
(University of Science and Technology, China)

(Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
Xue-xin Wei
(University of Texas, Austin), Klaus Larjo (Goldman-Sachs), Jason Prentice, Thomas Levi, Kristina Simmons, Charles Ratliff, John Briguglio, Kamesh Krishnamurthy, Alex Keinath (University of Illinois Chicago

Louis Kang (RIKEN Center for Brain Scienc

Arjun Kar, Matthew DeCross, Cathy Li, Ron Ditullio, and David Kersen. He has mentored many postdoctoral fellows includin
Ann Hermundstad
(Janelia Research Campus, HHMI)
Gasper Tkacik
(Institute of Science and Technology ST Austria)
Patrick Garrigan
(St. Joseph's University)
Joan Simon
(University of Edinburgh)
Monica Guica
(Institut de Physique Théoretique, Paris aclay
Tiberiu Tesileanu
(Flatiron Institute, New York), Serena Bradde (American Physical Society)
Vijay Singh
(North Carolina A&T State), Asad Naqvi (Goldman-Sachs), Onkar Parrikar (TIFR Mumbai), Gabor Sarosi, Charles Rabideau
Tomonori Ugajin
(Kyoto University), Eugenio Piasini (SISS

Gaia Tavoni (Washington University in St. Loui

Clélia de Mulatier (University of Amsterda

Philipp Fleig, Menachem (Nachi) Stern, Edgar Shaghoulian (University of California, Sant
Cruz
, and Javier Magan (Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Balasubramanian, Vijay Living people 1969 births Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Princeton University alumni Indian string theorists Scientists from Mumbai Harvard Fellows University of Pennsylvania faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society Aspen Center for Physics people Santa Fe Institute people American scientists of Asian descent