Georgi Dvali is a professor of physics at New York University whose research is focused on foundational theories of gravity and elementary particles. Among other questions, he is seeking to explain why gravity is the weakest of the four known fundamental forces of nature. With Stanford’s Savas Dimopoulos and other colleagues, he is exploring the hypothesis, posited by string theorists, that the universe has more than three dimensions as he looks for confirmation of his idea that gravity, unlike other forces, may be spread through these hidden dimensions, as well as those we experience in everyday life—and its relative strength reduced by “stretching” on a giant scale. Although yet to be confirmed, his theory about the so-called leakage of gravity could give greater weight to the prediction that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which is strongly supported by observational data. He is also currently exploring implications of the string theory
landscape. A native of Georgia, Dr. Dvali was graduated from Tbilisi State University, where he took first-class honors in theoretical physics and went on to earn a Ph.D. in high energy physics and cosmology in 1992. After post-doctoral research at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, and INFN in Pisa, Italy, he worked as a scientific associate at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and in 1997 returned to ICTP as a member of the High Energy Physics Group. He joined the NYU faculty as an assistant professor in 1998 and was appointed to his present professorship in 2003. Dr. Dvali has held a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. In 2001 he was the recipient of New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology. His work has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. In addition to giving invited lectures in the United States, Britain, Europe, Japan, and Turkey, he has published some 110 papers in scientific journals.