Matthias Staudacher
Matthias Staudacher is a German theoretical physicist who has done significant work in the area of quantum field theory. Education. Beginning his physics studies at the University of Heidelberg and at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Staudacher then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990) with a dissertation on matrix models of two-dimensional quantum gravity. After postdoctoral work at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Paris and CERN in Geneva, from 1997 he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam. In 2009 he received  the Academy Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and became a mathematical physics professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010. Some of his publications have been instrumental in developing an understanding of the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence, a duality between the Yang-Mills-type quantum theory and supersymmetric string theory first suggested in the 1990s by Juan Martín Maldacena. Staudacher suggests that the integrable spin chains of condensed matter physics may form the link between the two approaches.