Ph.D., U. of Rome, 1968

Research Interest:

Professor Ferrara's main research interests are in modern theories of gravitation and unification of fundamental interactions through the principle of symmetries. In 1974 he codiscovered (with B. Zumino, Berkeley) Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories and in 1976 he codiscovered (with D. Freedman, MIT, and P. Van Nieuwenhuizen, Stony-Brook) Supergravity. In 1993 he received the Dirac Medal and Prize from ICTP (Trieste) and in 2006 (with D. Freedman and P. Van Nieuwenhuizen) he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the APS. In 2005 he received an Honorary Degree in Physics, "Laurea Honoris Causa", from the 2nd University of Rome (Tor Vergata, Italy), and (with G. Veneziano, CERN, and B. Zumino, Berkeley) was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society.

In recent years Professor Ferrara studied many properties of the effective theories of superstrings and M-theory and in particular the role of duality symmetries in these theories. In 1995 (with R. Kallosh, Stanford, and A. Strominger, Harvard) he formulated the Attractor Mechanism for extremal black holes in four dimensions. This opened the way to further studies on the microscopic derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy area formula and generalizations thereof by exploiting mathematical properties of superstring theory.

Selected Recent Publications

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