Natalie Paquette

Note for prospective PhD students: Please contact me only if you have already applied and been accepted to UW.

My research is broadly in string theory and quantum field theory, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of these fields with modern mathematics. Currently, a main focus is on holographic correspondences in asymptotically anti de Sitter and flat spacetimes, and their connections to a mathematical notion from homological algebra called Koszul duality. I am also interested in field theoretic studies of condensed matter systems. 

 Some of my previous results (with many wonderful collaborators! Please see my arXiv or inspire pages for complete citations) include a string theoretic explanation of Monstrous moonshine, the identification of novel sporadic group symmetries acting on string vacua and their algebras of BPS states, a classification of boundary conditions in 3d supersymmetric conformal field theories (SCFTs) and their applications to infrared dualities and geometry, and elucidating criteria on 2d SCFTs to determine whether they admit weakly-curved 3d anti de Sitter (AdS) gravity duals.

Most recently, with Costello, I proposed a “chiral algebraic bootstrap” for certain scattering amplitude integrands, which arises by applying twisted holography techniques to twistor space; with Costello and Sharma, I also recently constructed a top-down example of a celestial holographic correspondence within the framework of the topological string on twistor space.

Prior to coming to the University of Washington, I was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. I got my PhD from Stanford University under the supervision of Shamit Kachru, and my BSc from Cornell University.

I am currently a DOE Early Career Research Fellow and a Principal Investigator and Executive Committee Member of the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.