Dr. Leonard Susskind has been one of the most creative and influential theoretical physicists of the past quarter century. He has made seminal contributions to all areas of modern particle physics from strong interaction phenomenology to formal developments of quantum chromodynamics, to current algebraic understanding of weak interactions. Dr. Susskind was one of the early pioneers of the string theory of strong interactions and of quantum chromodynamics. Then, when grand unified theories became popular, he independently proposed the so-called technicolor idea for breaking the electroweak symmetry at energies far below the scale of breaking of the grand unified symmetry. In cosmology, he was one of the early investigators of theories in which the present cosmological excess of baryons over antibaryons was created by CP violating processes in the very early universe. He has been a major figure in the development of modern string theory, the most promising quantum theory of gravity. In the mid-l990's he was a leader in attacking the paradoxical problem of information loss in black holes which led him in developing an intriguing "holographic" approach to fundamental physics. He is one of the founders of M Theory, the latest and most comprehensive form of string theories. He has been recognized for these contributions with the Sakurai Award of the American Physical Society. The citation reads: "For his pioneering contributions to hadronic string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics, and dynamical symmetry breaking."
He has been the Loeb Lecturer at Harvard and served on the faculty at Yeshiva University and Tel Aviv University and is now a Professor of Physics at Stanford University.
He is currently the Lawrence C. Biedenharn Visiting Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin.
The University of Texas at Austin