Steven Gubser, PhD

Steven Gubser was professor of Physics at Princeton University and one of the world’s leading string theorists. Gubser earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton as valedictorian of the Class of 1994, completed a master’s degree at Cambridge University, and returned to Princeton for his Ph.D. in physics in 1998, where his fellowship began in 1994. His doctoral research produced foundational contributions to the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, establishing exact relations between string theory and quantum field theory that have continued to shape theoretical physics for more than two decades. After a fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the Princeton faculty in 2000. He received the Gribov Medal from the European Physical Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was the author of The Little Book of String Theory (Princeton University Press, 2010). Gubser died on August 3, 2019, in a climbing accident in Chamonix, France.