Olaf Hohm
German theoretical physicist
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Olaf Hohm is a German theoretical physicist and professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. He has worked on massive gravity, double field theory, exceptional field theory and applications of -algebras in field theory.[1]
Education
Hohm earned his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2006, where his advisor was Henning Samtleben.[2]
Career
Following his PhD, Hohm conducted research at Utrecht University, University of Groningen, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3] In 2009, together with Eric Bergshoeff and Paul Townsend, he developed a consistent non-linear theory of massive gravity in 2+1 dimensions, called "New Massive Gravity", extending the linear theory of Fierz and Pauli from 1939.[4]
In 2010, together with Chris Hull and Barton Zwiebach, he co-developed double field theory.[5]
From 2011 to 2013, Hohm served as Akademischer Rat at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, after which he was awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship and returned to work at MIT and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.[6][7] In 2013, he and Samtleben formulated exceptional field theory.[8]
In 2018, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant and joined Humboldt University of Berlin, where he became a professor in 2022.[9]
