Laura Mersini-Houghton

Laura Mersini-Houghton (née Mersini) is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis and the author of a theory for the origin of the universe that holds that our universe is one of many selected by quantum gravitational dynamics of matter and energy. Mersini-Houghton has claimed that her theory explains unusual astrophysical data. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.

Biography Laura Mersini was born in Tirana, Albania, as a daughter of the mathematician and eminent economist Nexhat Mersini.

Mersini-Houghton received her B.S. degree from the University of Tirana, Albania.

In 1994, Mersini-Houghton was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park for 8 months.

In 1997, Mersini-Houghton was awarded her M.Sc. by the University of Maryland. Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III. Her predictions were successfully tested recently by the Planck satellite experiment. See also a discussion of her ideas in the context of the history and philosophical implications of the idea of a multiverse here.

In September 2014, Mersini-Houghton claimed to demonstrate mathematically that, given certain assumptions about black hole firewalls, current theories of black hole formation are flawed. She claimed that Hawking radiation causes the star to shed mass at a rate such that it no longer has the density sufficient to create a black hole. With Stephen Hawking, she organized a historic conference in 2015 in Stockholm to discuss these fundamental topics.

Teaching Mersini-Houghton teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Quantum Mechanics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://physics.unc.edu/people/mersini-houghton-laura/