Joe Polchinski in Santa Barbara (*)

Joseph Polchinski (born on May 16, 1954 in White Plains, New York) is a physicist working on string theory. He graduated from Canyon del Oro High School in Tucson, Arizona in 1971, obtained his B.S. degree from Caltech in 1975, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. After postdoctoral positions at SLAC (1980-82) and Harvard (1982-84) he was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1992. Since 1992 he has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Among his contributions to theoretical physics, D-branes are the best known.

Joe Polchinski is also the author of two volumes of the famous textbook "String Theory," an invaluable resource for graduate students seriously pursuing a future in theoretical physics.

Joe's family consists of his wife Dorothy, also a professor at UCSB, and two sons Steven and Daniel, both undergraduates at UC Berkeley.

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