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Cumrun Vafa (, ; born 1 August 1960) is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University.
He graduated from Alborz High School in Tehran and moved to the United States in 1976 to study at university. He received a B.S. in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1988 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Symmetries, inequalities and index theorems", under the supervision of Edward Witten.
Vafa worked at Princeton University within the Institute for Advanced Study, within the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Mathematics in 1994.
In 1997, he developed F-theory, a 12-dimensional theory that compactifies to 10-D Type IIB superstring theory.
He is also interested in understanding the underlying meaning of string dualities, as well as trying to apply superstring theory to some unsolved questions of elementary particle physics such as the hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem.
He has made contributions to topological string theories and to the understanding of mirror symmetry.
He is a trustee of Network of Iranians for Knowledge and Innovation (NIKI).
He is the recipient of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)'s, 2008 Dirac Medal, which was won alongside Juan Maldacena, and Joseph Polchinski for their advancement of string theory.
In 1998 he was a Plenary Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
In 2016, Vafa was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.
Vafa was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.
In 2021, Vafa was awarded the Mustafa Prize.
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