Joe Polchinski

Joe Polchinski has been a Permanent Member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Professor in the Department of Physics since 1992. He received his B.S. from Caltech in 1975 and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1980. He then held postdoctoral positions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Harvard, and was a member of the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1992.

Polchinski's awards include a Fannie and John Hertz graduate fellowship (1975-80), a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (1980-82), and an A.P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship (1985-89). He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997, and in 2005 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1998 he completed a two volume graduate textbook on string theory, which has become the standard text and reference in the field.