Stephen H. Shenker

Stephen Shenker is the Richard Herschel Weiland Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Physics at Stanford University. From 1998 to 2008 he was Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.  His contributions include basic insights into gauge theory dynamics; discovery of representations of conformal symmetry important in statistical mechanics, mathematics, and string theory; and covariant quantization and nonperturbative matrix formulations of string and M-theory. He is currently interested in applications of these ideas to cosmology and the interior of black holes. In 1987 Shenker was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2010 he received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society.