Prize Recipient

Gary T. Horowitz
University of California, Santa Barbara

"For fundamental contributions to classical gravity and gravitational aspects of string theory."

Gary T. Horowitz is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. in physics at Princeton University in 1976 and Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1979. He was a postdoc at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton before joining the faculty in Santa Barbara in 1983. Horowitz has significantly advanced our understanding of both classical and quantum gravity, especially gravitational aspects of string theory. He played a key role in the discovery of Calabi-Yau spaces (a way to consistently compactify string theory), extended black holes called black branes, the string-black hole transition, and holographic superconductors (a way to relate general relativity and superconductivity). Horowitz was awarded the Xanthopoulos Prize (an international prize for young scientists in gravitational physics) in 1993. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2010, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2013. Horowitz was President of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation from 2013 – 2016 and head of the Astrophysics, Gravity, and Cosmology panel at the National Academy of Sciences from 2014 - 2017. He was chair of the Division of Gravitational Physics at the American Physical Society from 2019-2020.