Curriculum Vitae

Biosketch

After completing his graduate studies in two years, Ooguri became a tenured faculty member of the University of Tokyo in 1986. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Chicago before receiving his Ph.D. in 1989. After four years as an associate professor at Kyoto University, he returned to the United States in 1994 as a full professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2000, Ooguri moved to Caltech, where he is the inaugural holder of the Fred Kavli Chair. He served as the Deputy Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy (equivalent to a vice dean of physical sciences) for five years since 2010, and led the establishment of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2014, serving as its Founding Director since then.

Ooguri was a Founding Principal Investigator of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo for fifteen years (2007 - 2022), and served as its Director from 2018 to 2023. In 2024, the University of Tokyo honored him with the title of University Professor.

Ooguri was a General Member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years (2003 - 2023), serving as the Scientific Secretary, a Trustee, the President, and the Chair of the Board of Trustees. He was elected an Honorary Trustee for Life in 2023.

Ooguri has received the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan, the Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics from the American Mathematical Society, the Simons Investigator Award from the Simons Foundation, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hamburg Prize and the Humboldt Research Award in Germany, the Louis Michel Chair at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in France, the Frontiers of Science Award at the International Congress of Basic Science in China, the Benjamin Lee Distinguished Professorship in Korea, and the Nishina Memorial Prize and the Chunichi Cultural Award in Japan. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society.

Ooguri's popular science books have sold over 300,000 copies in Japan, and one of them won the Kodansha Prize for Science Books. He also supervised a science movie, which was selected for the Best Educational Production Award from the International Planetarium Society and has been translated into six languages.

• CV in PDF format

• Research Publication: INSPIRE | ORCID | Google Scholar | researchmap

• Left: Nishina Prize Ceremony with 3 Nobel Laureates: Masatoshi Koshiba, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Maskawa.
• Right: Hamburg Prize Ceremony at the Planetarium Hamburg [photos courtesy of Joachim Herz Stiftung/Claudia Höhne].

Ooguri organized major conferences including Strings '98, Strings 2003, Strings 2018, and String-Math 2018.