Director of STAG Research Center at University of Southampton
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Director of STAG Research Center at University of Southampton

Kostas Skenderis is a professor at the School of Mathematics and director of STAG within Mathematical Sciences at University of Southampton.His research interests include relativity, cosmology, quantum field theory and string theory.

He has worked extensively on holographic dualities. According to him, holography, if correct, would change the paradigm for physical reality. This idea arose from black hole physics and concrete examples were found in the context of the AdS/CFT duality. In order to promote his idea, a significant part of his work has been devoted to developing and extending the holographic dictionary. The method is essential for obtaining well-defined rules for computations in gravity/gauge theory duality and moreover it explicitly shows how space-time is reconstructed from gauge theory data. Ultimately, this line of research should lead to a manifestly holographic reformulation of physics, thus completing the shift of paradigm.

“What is the structure of space and time? Has time a beginning or the Universe has always existed? These are some of the questions that concerned humans since ancient times. In the first moments of the Universe, the entire Universe was “compressed” into such a small space that only a quantum theory of gravity could describe it. Theoretical research in quantum gravity in the last 20 years has given evidence that the Universe is holographic, meaning that at a fundamental level the Universe is two-dimensional (plus the time) and the extra dimension (and gravity) is the result of the dynamic theory. The purpose of my recent work has been to look for observational evidence of holography in the primordial cosmic radiation. This radiation comes from the first moments of the Universe and its structure contains information about the laws of nature in the primordial Universe. We found that all the observations can be explained by a holographic model and that the observational data is equally compatible with both the new holographic model and the standard model of cosmology” Professor Skenderis said at ellines.com 

He received his B.Sc. in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1991. He then completed his Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics in the State University of New York at Stony Brook with the thesis “Perturbative QFT in 1, 2 and 4 dimensions” in 1996.

In September 1996, he started working as a research fellow at KU Leuvenin Belgium and in 1998 he moved to Utrecht University in the same position.

In 1999, he worked in the Physics Department at Princeton University in the United States as a research associate and in 2001 he was appointed as an assistant professor.

Skenderis, in 2003, moved to Netherlands and worked as an associate professor in the Physics Department at Institute for Theoretical Physics and Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics of the University of Amsterdam. He remained in that position until 2011, where he was appointed as a professor. He left the university in 2012.

From 2012 until present, Kostas Skenderis is a professor at the School of Mathematics of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Read also:

Is the Universe a hologram? The Greek researcher behind the findings explains

COMMENTS

  Comments: 1

  1. Daria Misouli

    Πολυ χαιρομαι να ακουω για Ελληνες, νεους ανθρωπους ,να διαπρεπουν στο εξωτερικο!!! Εχω δυο γιους ,που ζουν στο Σαουθαμπτον. Ο ενας εχει κανει εκει το διδακτορικο του στα μακροοικονομικα και ο αλλος εχει διδακτορικο στην αστροφυσικη. Ευχες απο την Ελλαδα.!


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