Stephen Shenker
Stephen Hart Shenker (* 1953) is an American theoretical physicist
He is the son of the physicist Henry Shenker (1917-2004), who worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratories in Washington. Shenker studied at Harvard University (Bachelor 1975) and in 1980 received his doctorate from Cornell University with John Kogut and Kenneth Wilson. As a post-doc, he was at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1981 he was at the University of Chicago, where it came to his collaboration with Daniel Friedan on conformal field theory and string theory. From 1989 he was a professor at Rutgers University ( such as Friedan, with whom he was involved in the founding of the New High Energy Theory Center). In 1998 he was a professor at Stanford University, where he was until 2008 Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Since 2004 he has been there Richard Herschel Weiland Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
With Zongan Qiu ( his PhD ) and Daniel Friedan 1984 he classified two-dimensional unitary conformal field theories that have application in statistical mechanics. With Friedan he dealt the mid-1980s with string theory, especially with the formulation as a conformal field theory on the world sheet. He developed in 1997 with Tom Banks, Willy Fischler and Leonard Susskind matrix model as a nonperturbative formulation of string theory and M- theory.
Shenker examined in 1979, the phase structure of Yang-Mills theories with Eduardo Fradkin. Most recently he worked on quantum gravity with applications to cosmology and to the interior of black holes.
In 1983 he was Sloan Fellow and in 1985 he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1987 he was MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded the Lars Onsager - price with Friedan. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society ( 2003) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006).
His brother Scott Shenker (* 1956) is a computer scientist, but also worked in theoretical physics.