Pierre Ramond

Pierre Ramond is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Throughout his research career, he initiated the development of superstring theory.

Ramond completed his bachelor’s degree at the Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), in 1965. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University in 1969. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) from 1969 to 1971. He was an instructor at Yale University from 1971 to 1973, and Assistant Professor at Yale from 1973 to 1976. He moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as an R.A. Millikan Senior Fellow in 1976. He became a Professor of Physics at the University of Florida in 1980, and was promoted to his present title of “Distinguished Professor” in 1999.

Ramond has received several awards for his contributions to theoretical physics. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from NJIT in 1990. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1984 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has received the 1992 Boris Pregel award from the New York Academy of Sciences; 2004 Oskar Klein Medal from the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences & Stockholm University; and the 2007 Lise Meitner Prize from Chalmers Technical University & Goteborg University. In 2015 he received the prestigious Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. In 2020, with André Neveu and Miguel Virasoro, he was jointly awarded the Dirac Medal of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) for their pioneering contributions to the inception and formulation of string theory.

In addition, Ramond has served as President of the Aspen Center For Physics in 2006-2008, as chair of the Faculty Senate of the University of Florida in 2004-2005, and as chair of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society in 2012.