Vijay Balasubramanian

Vijay Balasubramanian (born 1969 ) is an American theoretical physicist and the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted research in string theory, quantum field theory, and biophysics (especially theoretical and computational neuroscience). He has also worked on problems in statistical inference and machine learning. In 2024-25, Balasubramanian held the Eastman Professorship at Balliol College, University of Oxford, which is offered to one American scholar of distinction each year.

Biography Born in Mumbai, Balasubramanian spent his childhood in major Indian cities including New Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, and Hyderabad. While a student at MIT, he worked at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC). For this work at Xerox PARC, he received two patents in speech recognition.

Vijay Balasubramanian completed his doctoral studies at Princeton University, where he received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1997 under the supervision of Curtis Callan. He then moved to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. During this time, he was also a fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he currently holds the Cathy and Marc Lasry Chair in Physics and where he has a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine, Department of Neuroscience. In 2013, he co-founded the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at Penn.

In October 2021, he was a featured speaker in the Netflix documentary series Explained, in the episode on "Time." In 2022, Quanta Magazine featured him in an article and video in which he discussed connections between physics, computer science, neurosciences, and humanities fields such as literature. Quanta described him as a "polymath who is prone to leaping from string theory to Proust in mid-conversation." In 2023, the Catalan-language daily newspaper of Barcelona, Ara, featured him in an article in which he discussed the relative powers and limits of the human brain and of Artificial Intelligence, and what physics can bring to the study of theoretical and computational neuroscience. Balasubramanian also spoke on Aspen Public Radio with physicist Lisa Randall and composers Chris Theofanidis and John Luther Adams on music, science, and creativity.

Affiliations Vijay Balasubramanian has been a research associate and visiting professor at many institutions. These include Rockefeller University; the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center; the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, France; the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy; the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Brussels, Belgium; the University of Oxford in the UK; and the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bangalore, India. In 2007–8, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) (Princeton), supported by an IAS grant from Helen and Martin Chooljian. Since 2011, he has been a General Member of the Aspen Center for Physics in Aspen, Colorado. In 2022, he became an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute.

Honors Vijay Balasubramanian has won many prizes and fellowships. In 2005, Balasubramanian won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition, with his colleagues Don Marolf and Moshe Rozali for an essay on “Information Recovery from Black Holes”. In 2006, he won the Ira H. Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching – the highest teaching award given by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2019, the American Physical Society honored Balasubramanian by recognizing him as a Fellow of the society. His citation as a 2019 APS Fellow noted his "fundamental contributions clarifying the black hole information puzzle and black hole thermodynamics through work on the duality of quantum gravity and quantum field theory, and on black hole microscopics in theories of quantum gravity".

In 2024-25, Balasubramanian held the Eastman Professorship at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Kamesh Krishnamurthy (Zyphra), Alex Keinath (University of Illinois Chicago), Louis Kang (RIKEN Center for Brain Science), Arjun Kar (Google Deepmind), Matthew DeCross (Quantinuum), Cathy Li, Ron Ditullio, David Kersen (Weill Cornell Medicine), and Qingyue Wu (Squarepoint).

He has mentored many postdoctoral fellows including Ann Hermundstad (Janelia Research Campus, HHMI), Gasper Tkacik (Institute of Science and Technology [IST], Austria), Patrick Garrigan (St. Joseph's University), Joan Simon (University of Edinburgh), Monica Guica (Institut de Physique Théoretique, Paris [Saclay]), Tiberiu Tesileanu (Flatiron Institute, New York), Serena Bradde (American Physical Society), Vijay Singh (Villanova University), Asad Naqvi (Goldman-Sachs), Onkar Parrikar (TIFR Mumbai), Gabor Sarosi, Charles Rabideau, Tomonori Ugajin (Kyoto University), Eugenio Piasini (SISSA), Gaia Tavoni (Washington University in St. Louis), Clélia de Mulatier (University of Amsterdam), Hanrong Chen (Genome Institute of Singapore), Philipp Fleig, Menachem (Nachi) Stern (AMOLF, Amsterdam), Mikhail Khramstov (Steklov Institute), Edgar Shaghoulian (University of California, Santa Cruz), Javier Magan (Instituto Balseiro, Argentina; University of Barcelona), Chitraang Murdia, and Monica Kang (Texas A&M).