Research

Peter van Nieuwenhuizen's research area is quantum field theory with applications to supergravity, supersymmetry, and string theory. He is one of the inventors of supergravity, which was discovered here at Stony Brook in 1976, and for which he received the Dirac Medal and Prize in 1993, the Heineman Prize in 2005, and the Special Breakthrough Prize in 2019. He is interested in Kaluza-Klein reductions of supergravities, the measure for path integrals, quantum corrections to solitons, and more. He started the so-called Friday seminars, where graduate students help prepare seminars for their peers and faculty on new developments in theoretical physics. He has served as advisor to 16 Ph.D students, 14 of whom have or have had faculty positions. van Nieuwenhuizen has written 320 articles on his research, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Although retired, he continues to teach advanced graduate classes on superstring theory, group theory, supersymmetry and supergravity, and general relativity, but he no longer accepts students for a PhD.