Vijay Balasubramanian was born in Bombay, India, and spent his childhood in Indian cities including Bombay, New Delhi, Madras, Calcutta, and Hyderabad. Among the elementary schools he attended are St. Mary’s in Bombay, St. Xavier’s in Calcutta, and St. Columba’s in New Delhi. His family later moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he attended Jakarta International School. After graduating from JIS, he moved to the United States and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned B.S. degrees in Physics and Computer Science and an M.S. degree in Computer Science. While a student at MIT, he worked at CERN and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. For this work at Xerox PARC, he received two patents in speech recognition. Vijay Balasubramanian completed his doctoral studies at Princeton University, where he received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1997 under the supervision of Curtis Callan. He then moved to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. During this time, he was also a fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he currently holds the Cathy and Marc Lasry Chair in Physics and where he has a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine, Department of Neuroscience. In 2013, he co-founded the .
Vijay Balasubramanian has won many prizes and fellowships. In 2005, Balasubramanian won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition, with his colleagues Don Marolf and Moshe Rozali for an essay on “Information Recovery from Black Holes”. In 2006, he won the Ira H. Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching – the highest teaching award given by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012-13 he won a fellowship from the Fondation Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, which he held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. In 2015, Balasubramanian was part of the international team of string theorists, computer scientists, and quantum information theorists that won a major grant from the Simons Foundation in New York to investigate the emergence of the fabric of spacetime from information. Their project is entitled, . In 2019, the American Physical Society honored Balasubramanian by recognizing him as a Fellow of the society. His citation as a 2019 APS Fellow noted his "fundamental contributions clarifying the black hole information puzzle and black hole thermodynamics through work on the duality of quantum gravity and quantum field theory, and on black hole microscopics in theories of quantum gravity".
Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows
Vijay Balasubramanian’s PhD students have included , , , Klaus Larjo, Jason Prentice, Thomas Levi, Kristina Simmons, Charles Ratliff, John Briguglio, Kamesh Krishnamurthy, Alex Keinath, Louis Kang, Arjun Kar, Matthew DeCross, Cathy Li, Ron Ditullio, and David Kersen. He has mentored many postdoctoral fellows including , , , , , , Serena Bradde, , Asad Naqvi, Onkar Parrikar, Gabor Sarosi, Charles Rabideau, , Eugenio Piasini, Gaia Tavoni, Clélia de Mulatier, Philipp Fleig, and Menachem Stern.
