Latest News

The image above shows the start of construction for KITP House! Since I last wrote, we have achieved many milestones. Read more

Lars Bildsten, KITP Director
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2026

The scientists who spotted it interpreted the feature as a super-massive black hole plowing through intergalactic space, triggering star formation in its wake. Now researchers from UC Santa Barbara and University of Texas at Austin have published a paper on the violent event that could have shot this behemoth from its host galaxy. Read more.

Established in 1979 with an originating grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), KITP is a facility for the theoretical physics community. Our major activities are programs and conferences, which convene more than 1,400 visitors at KITP for both prolonged stays (usually three weeks or longer) and four-day conferences. The institute also benefits from international participation, as over 40% of visitors come from outside the United States. KITP’s mission is to be “the place” where new research is initiated, collaborations are formed and new connections are made across disciplines. High demand keeps our facilities full 50 weeks out of the year!

"The mind is what the brain does," as the pioneering artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky once said. So it’d be fantastic to understand at what level of anatomy, or complexity, the brain actually carries out its processing and computation. This quandary is precisely what captivates Fatih Dinc, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and Geometric Intelligence Lab. Read more

Gluck Professor of Theoretical Physics Lars Bildsten, Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2026. Read more

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced physicist David J. Gross, of UC Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, among the winners of the 2026 Breakthrough Prizes, honoring scientists whose discoveries are significantly driving growth of human knowledge. Read more

Physics of intelligence
Join KITP Postdoctoral Scholar Fatih Dinç to explore how different systems, human brains, computer programs, and other machines store, process, and use information — in other words, how do they perform computations? Learn more about Café KITP.

When KITP’s visitors arrive at Kohn Hall before they dig into their science and collaborations, they wonder, “How do I get into the building? Where is my office?” And of course, “Where is the coffee?”
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Demi Cain, KITP Development Coordinator
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2025

KITP Postdoc Bruno Scheihing-Hitschfeld is awarded for outstanding dissertation in nuclear physics by the American Physical Society. 
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Harrison Tasoff, Science Writer, UCSB Public Affairs & Communications
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2025

Bill Paxton ingrained himself into astrophysics, and into the astrophysics community, in an indelible manner.
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Harrison Tasoff, Science Writer, UCSB Public Affairs & Communications
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2025