Allan Adams uses string theoretic techniques to study quantum gravity and, increasingly, nongravitational many-body systems such as superconductors.

Like water, string theory enjoys many distinct phases in which the low-energy phenomena take qualitatively different forms. In its most familiar phases, string theory reduces to a perturbative theory of quantum gravity. In other phases, when the gravitational interactions become strong and a smooth space-time geometry ceases to be a good approximation, a more convenient description involves particle physics and fluid dynamics without gravity. Remarkably, these two descriptions — with and without gravity — appear to be completely equivalent, with one remaining easy to study when its dual is strongly interacting. This equivalence, known as gauge-gravity duality, allows us to study strongly quantum many-body systems (for example, toy models for high-temperature superconductors) by studying the classical physics of their weakly-coupled duals.

A major focus of Adams's present research is to use such dualities to find useful descriptions of strongly interacting condensed matter systems which can be realized in the lab.

Allan Adams has been an assistant professor at MIT since 2008. He earned his AB in physics from Harvard University in 1998, his MA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000, his PhD from Stanford University in 2003 and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows before moving to MIT.

Martin Bazant is an expert in applied mathematics and engineering physics.

His research focuses on transport phenomena in microfluidics and electrochemical systems, with an eye toward applications in energy storage, water purification and lab-on-a-chip technology.

Bob Cohen studied at Cornell (BS), Caltech (MS and PhD) and Oxford (postdoc) before joining the MIT faculty in 1973. He is the founding director of MIT’s Program in Polymer Science and Technology and the architect of MIT’s unique doctoral program in chemical engineering practice.

Currently, he is the St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering. He has been a director of the DuPont MIT Alliance since its inception in 2000. His publications reflect interests in polymer structure-property relations. On the basis of patents produced in his laboratory, he cofounded MatTek Corporation (www.mattek.com) in 1985. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering, the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. In 2010 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Cohen and his wife, Jane, live in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. They have two children: Genevieve, a kindergarten teacher in San Diego, and Eliot who works in information technology in Boston.

Janet Conrad received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College, her MS from Oxford University and her PhD from Harvard University. She was a postdoc with Columbia University, and then was promoted to faculty in the physics department in 1996. In 2008, she moved to MIT. 

Conrad has received numerous awards, including the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award from the American Physical Society in 2001. Most recently, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. She has been involved in neutrino physics since 1993.

Enectalí Figueroa-Feliciano received a BS degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 1995. He earned his masters and PhD in physics at Stanford University working with professors Blas Cabrera and Arthur B. C. Walker. Upon graduation from Stanford in 2001, he became an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

He is the principal investigator for the Micro-X sounding rocket, and a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search collaboration, the International X-ray Observatory Instrument Working Group, the Generation-X Mission team, and the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter sounding rocket team.

Joseph Formaggio’s research explores the nature of neutrinos and their deep connection between particle physics and cosmology. He undertakes this exploration through a variety of experimental techniques, which range from "listening" to the radio-frequency chirp emitted by charged particles to giant "telescopes" buried deep within the Earth's surface.

Formaggio received his BS degree from Yale University in physics in 1996. He received his PhD in physics from Columbia University. In 2001, he joined the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where he was later appointed as a research assistant professor. He has been at MIT as an assistant professor since 2005.

Gedik joined MIT Department of Physics as an assistant professor in January 2008. He received his BS in physics in 1998 from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, and his PhD in physics in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley. After his PhD, he moved to Caltech, where worked as a postdoctoral scholar till January 2008.

Jeff Gore's laboratory studies evolutionary dynamics by combining microbial experiments with ideas from physics, mathematics and economics.

As a Pappalardo Fellow in the department, he used approaches from game theory to understand how yeast cells cooperate to grow on the sugar sucrose, yielding insight into the conditions required for the evolution of cooperative behaviors.

Gore received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Hertz Fellow, where he developed new techniques to manipulate individual biological molecules such as DNA. Over the years, Gore’s biophysics research has appeared in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Qing Hu received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1987. After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the MIT faculty in 1990, where he is now a full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Hu has made significant contributions to physics and device applications over a broad electromagnetic spectrum from millimeter wave, THz, to infrared frequencies; involving both technology development for detectors and sources and system-level imaging and sensing applications. Among those contributions, the most distinctive is his development of high-performance THz quantum cascade lasers, which have already led to applications in heterodyne receiver technology and real-time THz imaging, which was also pioneered by his group.

He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), a fellow of American Physical Society (APS), a fellow of the IEEE and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).