Raman Sundrum

Biography

Sundrum did his undergraduate studies at University of Sydney in Australia and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1990. He was one of two Alumni Centennial Professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003 "for his discoveries in supergravity and in theories of extra dimensions, and for applications to testable models of fundamental physics".

In 2010, Sundrum left Johns Hopkins and moved to the University of Maryland. His research is in theoretical particle physics and focuses on theoretical mechanisms and observable implications of extra spacetime dimensions, supersymmetry, and strongly coupled dynamics.

According to Scientific American, he was considering leaving physics for finance, when his future collaborator Lisa Randall called to propose working together on membranes, or "branes" as they are known. Branes are domains or swaths of several spatial dimensions within a higher-dimensional space. The fruits of that collaboration were papers known as RS-1 and RS-2.