Laura Mersini

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Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton (née Laura Mersini) is a theoretical physicist-cosmologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since January 2004.

She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Tirana in her native Albania, and she was awarded a PhD in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has worked on a variety of topics on the particle physics-cosmology interface. She was particularly interested in the possibility of generating dark energy from transplanckian physics in string theory, gravity and quantum field theory in curved space, and higher-dimension braneworlds. She says that when it comes to what we know about the universe, current physics theory is lagging a little behind. For example, the Big Bang theory might not be enough to explain the origin of all the matter in the universe (everything from the universe's large-scale structure — galaxies and the like — to cosmic microwave background radiation, dark matter, and the rest).