Shamit Kachru

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Shamit Kachru is a string theorist who is a professor of physics at Stanford University and at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He is the son of the Kashmiri scholar Braj Kachru. He is married to Eva Silverstein, who is also a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and at SLAC.

Kachru graduated from University High School in Urbana, Illinois and from Harvard University before obtaining a doctorate in physics from Princeton University under the supervision of Edward Witten. Kachru was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University.

Kachru is best known for his extensive work on stabilizing the extra dimensions of string theory, in particular finding (along with Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde, and Sandip Trivedi) the first models of accelerated expansion of the universe in low energy supersymmetric string compactifications.

He has also made notable contributions to string theory duality (with Cumrun Vafa), the AdS/CFT correspondence (with Eva Silverstein), and to the construction of models of cosmic inflation in string theory.