Leonardo Rastelli

Leonardo Rastelli is a professor at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Stony Brook University, where he is the inaugural holder of the Renaissance Chair in Theoretical Physics. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2000. He was a Dicke Fellow (2000-2002) and an Assistant Professor (2002-2006) at Princeton University before joining the YITP in 2006. Rastelli is the recipient of an Outstanding Junior Investigator award, a Simons Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a Blavatnik national finalist.

Rastelli’s research interests have ranged from structural aspects of string theory to purely field-theoretic questions. He is known for his contributions to the AdS/CFT correspondence, string field theory, supersymmetric field theory and the bootstrap program. Currently, Rastelli works on a broad range of problems in theoretical physics. He is interested in developing a deeper framework for quantum field theory and quantum gravity, based on symmetry and general consistency principles, in the spirit of the bootstrap model.