Henry Tye

Who is Henry Tye?

Sze-Hoi Henry Tye is a Chinese-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist most notable for proposing that a brane and an antibrane attraction and annihilation with one another, causes cosmic inflation and his work on superstring theory, brane cosmology and elementary particle physics. He had his primary and secondary school education in Hong Kong. Graduated from La Salle College. He received his B.S. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Francis Low. He is currently the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell University and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has also recently become the director of the Institute for Advanced Study within the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Together with Gia Dvali, he suggested the idea of brane inflation in 1998 which was later put on concrete string theoretic grounds by Shamit Kachru and collaborators. He went on to work out many details of brane inflation with his research group at Cornell. He was responsible for the revival of the interest in cosmic strings.