Hirosi Ooguri is a leading theorist in high energy physics and works at the interface of elementary particle physics, string theory, and related mathematics. He has made fundamental contributions to conformal field theories in two dimensions and to topological string theory. He is also widely recognized for his research on geometric description of gauge theory dynamics, including geometric engineering and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Ooguri was born in 1962 in Japan and studied physics and mathematics at Kyoto University. After two years in the Graduate School of Kyoto University, at the age of 23, he was offered a tenured assistant professor position at the University of Tokyo. After spending a year on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he moved to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in physics. A year later, he was lured back to Japan as an associate professor of mathematical physics at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto University. In Japan, he was a co-principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project of physics and mathematics called "Infinite Analysis," funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 1984, he became a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later, he also received a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a faculty senior scientist. In 2000, he moved to the California Institute of Technology where he is the Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics.

Ooguri is a member of the Advisory Board and Steering Committee of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He has also organized two long-term workshops at the Institute and participated in various other activities there.

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