Research Interests

Our research is focused on fundamental questions related to the origin of the universe and its ultimate fate. How did the universe begin? What is its eventual fate? Do atoms represent all of the stuff making up the universe, or do things like dark energy and dark matter control our ultimate fate? Questions like these are at the center of our research. Present theories suggest that the seeds for the growth of structures like galaxies and eventually life resulted from the quantum behavior of particles and fields in the very early universe — when it was less than a fraction of a second old. Such a description requires a quantum understanding of gravity with string theory being our leading candidate for such a theory. And so our  research is also focused on establishing observational implications of string theory.