Shamit Kachru, an associate professor of physics at Stanford University, works primarily on string theory and M theory. He was previously engaged in investigations of “stringy” modifications of geometry, duality and exact results in supersymmetric compactifications, and supersymmetry breaking. Of Kashmiri decent, he is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He took his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1994. Dr. Kachru began his academic career as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and soon joined the physics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor. He was named to his current post at Stanford in 1999. The recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Dr. Kachru also has held a William F. Milton Fund Research Grant given by Harvard, a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, a Bergmann Memorial Research Grant given by the U.S.-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation, and a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship. A member of the editorial board of the Journal of High Energy Physics, he is the author of more than sixty papers published in scientific journals.