Paul Townsend

Paul Kingsley Townsend FRS (born March 3, 1951) is a British physicist and Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is renowned for his contributions to string theory and has published over 320 papers in the field. Townsend received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1976, focusing on the 1/N expansion of scalar field theories under the supervision of Howard Joel Schnitzer. In collaboration with Michael Duff and Edward Witten, Townsend demonstrated in 1987 that there are no superstrings in eleven dimensions, but rather supermembranes. Notably, he formulated pure 4D N = 1 supergravity in anti-de Sitter space in 1977. Townsend was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2000.