Lisa Randall, a professor of physics at Harvard University, is the most cited theoretical physicist in the 21st century. She attracted the attention of the world physics community when she and Raman Sundrum published papers on the “Warped Extra Dimension.” The Randall-Sundrum Model has been acclaimed as a crucial piece of the puzzle modern physics is working on, especially in dealing with the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model.

 Some of her major books are Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. Her first book, Warped Passages, was The New York Times’ Book of the Year and an international bestseller in science publications.

 Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt has been the Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University since 2016. He graduated with a BS in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona and received an MA and PhD in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1993, under the tutelage of Professor Robert Kirshner, he came into the spotlight in academia with his doctoral thesis on measuring the Hubble Constant using Type II Supernovae.

 After his postgraduate study, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until 1994. In 1995, he formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team to study supernovae at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, the headquarters of The Australian National University Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Eventually, the team used data on a five-billion-year-old Type Ia supernova to present early evidence that the universe’s expansion rate was accelerating. For this accomplishment, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.