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Watch live: Ashtekar introduced to membership of National Academy of Sciences

27 April 2017

The 154th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences

Watch as Penn State University Professor of Physics Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, is introduced to his colleagues in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and signs the 154-year-old “Registry of Membership” at the annual meeting of the NAS at 8 p.m. on April 29. The event, held at the NAS Building in Washington D.C. is being live-streamed. Watch the celebration at http://www.nasonline.org/NAS154presentation.

In August 2016, Ashtekar was elected as a member of the NAS, one of the highest honors accorded to U.S. scientists or engineers by their peers. Renowned as one of the most-cited researchers in the field of relativity, Ashtekar’s research focuses on classical general relativity and quantum gravity. Thanks to his groundbreaking work, loop quantum gravity -- a quantum theory of spacetime -- has become an approach to the unification of general relativity and quantum physics pursued in dozens of research groups worldwide. Ashtekar continues to play a seminal role in the development of this field, as well as its sub-field -- loop quantum cosmology. He has made contributions to quantum-field theory, gauge theories, general relativity, and quantum gravity. In addition, he has proposed theories concerning the interface between geometry and physics.