Katrin Becker | |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s) | Theoretical physicist and professor at Texas A&M |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Bonn
University of California, Santa Barbra California Institute of Technology |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Physicist |
| Sub-discipline | Theoretical physicist specializing in string theory |
| Institutions | Texas A&M |
Katrin Becker (born Gelsenkirchen, Germany, October 7, 1967) is a theoretical physicist and textbook author specializing in string theory. She is a professor of physics at Texas A&M University.[1]
Becker earned her diploma under Werner Nahm at the University of Bonn where she also received her doctorate in 1994 with a dissertation titled, Strings, black holes and conformal field theory. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and then a senior research fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with John Henry Schwarz. She became an assistant professor at the University of Utah before moving to Texas A&M University in 2005.[1][2]
Becker deals with string theory, for example in the development of models that make predictions for the Standard Model and realize models of inflation in cosmology.[2] She worked closely with her sister, physicist Melanie Becker (also a professor at Texas A&M), with whom she wrote a popular string theory textbook along with John Henry Schwarz.[1]
A general description of Katrin Becker's physics research has been published:
In our quest for the fundamental laws of nature, we are led to wonder how to construct a theory of quantum gravity, a theory that reconciles gravity with quantum physics. Prof. K. Becker works on string theory. This is a quantum theory that predicts gravitation instead of contradicting it and it could be the unified theory of nature. It is a fascinating and unique framework.[1]
In 2003, she received a Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and in 2005, a Radcliffe Fellowship.[1][2]
In 2017, she received the Bush Excellence Award for Faculty in International Research [3]
Katrin Becker was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany to Ingrid and Karl-Hans Becker on October 7, 1967. She grew up in Malaga, Spain, with her older sister Melanie Becker, and the two sisters were recruited to Texas A&M in 2005 as part of a faculty reinvestment program. Katrin survived her sister and collaborator Melanie who died in 2020 after a long fight with cancer.[4]
