Thomas Banks

University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey~~Distinguished Professor of Physics; Professor of Physics. Leader in theoretical high-energy physics, string theory, and cosmology. Discovered the simplest controlled four-dimensional conformal field theories and provided crucial insight into chiral symmetry breaking and into the origin of 't Hooft anomaly matching conditions. Early developer of supersymmetric models, thought by many to describe the physics to be explored at the Large Hadron Collider. Analyzed critical constraints on models of new physics that arise from cosmology. Contributed to the understanding of the Hawking information loss paradox and proved that global symmetries do not arise in perturbative string theory. Proposed the Matrix Theory of quantum mechanical matrices, in which general relativity is an emergent phenomenon.~