Massimo Porrati is a professor of physics, and a member of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

. He graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, also known in Italian as Scuola Normale , is a public higher learning institution in Italy. It was founded in 1810, by Napoleonic decree, as a branch of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris...

, Italy with a "Diploma di Scienze" degree in 1985. Later he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and UC Berkeley in the USA. He was a research scientist at the INFN section in Pisa

Pisa

Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, Italy, in collaboration with CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

, before joining NYU in 1992. His major research interests are String Theory

String theory

String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

, Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry

In particle physics, supersymmetry is a symmetry that relates elementary particles of one spin to other particles that differ by half a unit of spin and are known as superpartners...

 and Supergravity

Supergravity

In theoretical physics, supergravity is a field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity. Together, these imply that, in supergravity, the supersymmetry is a local symmetry...

, Nonperturbative Aspects of Strings and Quantum Field Theory

Quantum field theory

Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...

, and Cosmology

Cosmology

Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...

.

Among other things, Porrati is known for his work on the large-distance modification of gravity and its application to the cosmological constant

Cosmological constant

In physical cosmology, the cosmological constant was proposed by Albert Einstein as a modification of his original theory of general relativity to achieve a stationary universe...

 problem. With Gia Dvali

Gia Dvali

Georgi Dvali is a professor of physics at LMU Munich and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics and cosmology from Tbilisi State University, Georgia in 1992...

 and Gregory Gabadadze

Gregory Gabadadze

Gregory Gabadadze is a Georgian theoretical physicist. He is currently member of the Department of Physics at New York University. He is known for the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati multidimensional braneworld model of gravity, also known as DGP model....

 he co-pioneered and advanced this direction by proposing a generally covariant model of infrared modification of gravity (the so-called DGP model

DGP model

The DGP model is a model of gravity proposed by Gia Dvali, Gregory Gabadadze, and Massimo Porrati in 2000. The model is popular among some model builders, but has resisted being embedded into string theory....

), and studying many novel and subtle features of this class of models.

Porrati held the Marie Curie

Marie Curie

Marie Skłodowska-Curie was a physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry...

Chair (2005-2007) at the Theoretical Physics Group in the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy.