Horațiu Năstase is a

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...

group at Instituto de Física Teórica of the

São Paulo State University São Paulo State University (Unesp, ) is a public university run by the São Paulo State Government, state government of São Paulo (state), São Paulo, Brazil. Unesp has a combined student body of over 45,000 spread among its 23 campuses. The ...

São Paulo São Paulo (; ; Portuguese for 'Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul') is the capital of the São Paulo (state), state of São Paulo, as well as the List of cities in Brazil by population, most populous city in Brazil, the List of largest cities in the ...

, Brazil. He was born in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ) is the capital and largest city of Romania. The metropolis stands on the River Dâmbovița (river), Dâmbovița in south-eastern Romania. Its population is officially estimated at 1.76 million residents within a greater Buc ...

, Romania, and finished high school at the Nicolae Bălcescu High School (now Saint Sava National College). He did his undergraduate studies in the Physics Department of the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest (UB) () is a public university, public research university in Bucharest, Romania. It was founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princely Academy of Bucharest, P ...

, graduating in 1995. His last year there he studied at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), Copenhagen University, with a scholarship which continued into the following year. In 1996 he joined the Physics Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from which he received his PhD in May 2000, with thesis written under the direction of Peter van Nieuwenhuizen. From 2000 to 2002 he was a postdoc at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

in Princeton, after which he was an assistant research professor at

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

until 2006. From 2007 to 2009 he was an assistant professor at the Global Edge Institute of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. Since 2010, Năstase holds a permanent position as

assistant professor Assistant professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doct ...

at IFT-UNESP in Brazil. Năstase attracted some media attention in 2005 by arguing that

could be tested by the

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy- ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used ...

, through the AdS/CFT correspondence. He is also known for his work in 2002 with David Berenstein and Juan Maldacena to investigate the duality between strings on pp-wave spacetime and "BMN operators" in supersymmetric

Yang–Mills theory Yang–Mills theory is a quantum field theory for nuclear binding devised by Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills in 1953, as well as a generic term for the class of similar theories. The Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory based on a special un ...

Publications

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References

External links

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Instituto de Física Teórica Website
Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Scientists from Bucharest Saint Sava National College alumni University of Bucharest alumni Romanian emigrants to the United States Romanian physicists String theorists Theoretical physicists Stony Brook University alumni Brown University faculty Academic staff of Tokyo Institute of Technology Academic staff of the São Paulo State University {{physicist-stub