XANTHOPOULOS INTERNATIONAL AWARD
FOR RESEARCH
IN GRAVITATIONAL PHYSICS

THE SELECTION COMMITTEE

having taken into account the nominations for the award and
having deliberated opinions put forward by its members, confers the

2001 Xanthopoulos Award
on

Dr. JUAN MALDACENA

Professor of Physics at Harvard University

for his ground-breaking work applying string theory to problems in gravitational physics. Maldacena was one of the leaders in the remarkable developments five years ago in which entropy and grey-body factors of certain charged black holes were reproduced exactly by microscopic string theory calculations. Motivated by these results, Maldacena proposed a far reaching conjecture relating string theory (which includes gravity) to strongly coupled field theories (without gravity). Although the implications of this correspondence are still being explored, it is already clear that this work has provided striking new insights into quantum gravity.