Raphael Bousso

I am interested in quantum gravity and cosmology. My research focuses on the deep role that quantum information plays in these settings. According to the covariant entropy bound, the geometry of spacetime is closely related to its information content. We have sharpened and strengthened this "holographic" relation in recent years. Though strictly a hypothesis about quantum gravity, entropy bounds have become a discovery tool that is yielding new, provable features of relativistic quantum field theory, such as the quantum null energy condition. These and related insights have led to fruitful interactions with quantum information theory and condensed matter physics. They also have useful applications to benchmarking current quantum computing platforms. I lead GeoFlow, a multi-institutional consortium of theorists and experimentalists working at the interface of these areas.

Brief bio: I grew up in southern Germany. (I was born and have family in Israel but never lived there.) When I was little, I thought math was interesting, and I still do. But I decided instead to try to figure out how the universe works. I studied with Stephen Hawking in Cambridge, and I spent postdoc years at Stanford, KITP (Santa Barbara), and Harvard, before joining UC Berkeley as faculty (since 2003).

Sean Colin-Ellerin

I am interested in conformal field theory, string theory, and quantum gravity. My research currently focuses on understanding the microscopic details of generalized entropy in quantum gravity using conformal bootstrap techniques.

Phil Saad

I am interested in quantum gravity. My research has focused on the relationships between chaos in black hole microstates and spacetime topology. Currently I am studying signatures of this chaos in the black hole interior and in related closed universes.

Arvin Shahbazi-Moghaddam

I am broadly curious about the fundamental theory of quantum gravity, and in recent years focused on how semiclassical gravity emerges from this underlying theory. Specifically, I have worked on imprints of this underlying theory onto the semiclassical world which often takes the form of information-theoretic constraints. I have also been exploring ways in which the semiclassical approximation can fail completely, for example at the black hole singularity.

Pratik Rath

I am interested in applying ideas from quantum information theory to understand quantum gravity. My research has focused on using random tensor networks as toy models for quantum gravity and understanding the holographic duals of various entanglement measures such as entanglement entropy, entanglement negativity and reflected entropy. I am also interested in extracting lessons for quantum gravity from the gravitational path integral.

Stefano Antonini

I am interested in quantum gravity and cosmology. My research has focused on understanding cosmology in holographic quantum gravity and on using quantum information theoretic tools to explore the properties of quantum gravity. I am also interested in understanding the precise role the gravitational path integral can play in the quantization of gravity.