David R. Morrison

Morrison is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist, working on string theory and algebraic geometry.

Morrison received his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton in 1976, received an A.M. in mathematics from Harvard in 1977, and completed his Ph.D. in mathematics under Phillip Griffiths in 1980. From 1980, Morrison was an instructor and from 1982 an assistant professor at Princeton. In the academic year 1984–1985, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Kyoto (as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). In 1986, he became an associate professor and in 1992 a professor of mathematics at Duke and in 1997 was named “James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Physics.” In 1992–1993, 1996–1997 and 2000 he conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1995 he was a visiting professor at Cornell University, in 2005 he worked at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and in 2006 was a research professor at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. Since 2006 he has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In 2015, Morrison was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2005, he became a Senior Scholar at the Clay Mathematics Institute, and in 2005–2006 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.