Raphael Bousso
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Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2026)
Raphael Bousso | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1971 (age 54–55) Haifa, Israel |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD) |
| Known for | Bousso bound String theory landscape |
| Awards | Fellow of the American Physical Society (2012) Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2026) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics, cosmology, quantum gravity |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley Stanford University Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Harvard University |
| Thesis | Pair creation of black holes in cosmology (1997) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stephen Hawking |
Raphael Bousso (/ˈbuːsoʊ/) (born 1971) is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is a professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Chancellor's Chair in Physics. He is known for the Bousso bound on the information content of the universe.[1][2][3] With Joseph Polchinski, Bousso proposed the string theory landscape as a solution to the cosmological constant problem.[4][5]
Bousso was born in Haifa, Israel, the son of late scientist Dino Bousso [wd].[6] He grew up near Augsburg, Germany,[7] where he studied physics from 1990 until 1993. Bousso earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in 1997; his doctoral advisor was Stephen Hawking. Bousso did postdoctoral research at Stanford University until 2000, and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara until 2002. In 2002/03, Bousso was a fellow at the Harvard University physics department and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Since 2002, he has been a professor in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, Bousso was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for fundamental discoveries in the field of quantum cosmology, including the covariant entropy bound and the string landscape."[8] In 2026, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9]
