Rate My Professor Stefan Vandoren

Stefan Vandoren is Professor in Theoretical Physics at Utrecht University, based at the Institute for Theoretical Physics within the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science. He serves as Chair of String Theory. He obtained his undergraduate diploma from the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1990, and his PhD degree from the same university in December 1995 with highest distinction for his thesis "Covariant Quantisation in the Antifield Formalism," supervised by Prof. Antoine Van Proeyen. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Wales, Swansea (1996-1999) and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook (1999-2001), he joined Utrecht University as Assistant Professor in 2001, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007, and became Full Professor in 2012. He was Scientific Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2012 to 2018 and Head of the Department of Physics from 2018 to 2024.

Vandoren's research is centered around superstring theory, supergravity, and black holes, encompassing topics such as instantons in string theory, quaternion-Kähler metrics, holography, and applications to condensed matter systems like Weyl semimetals. He has co-authored the book "Time in Powers of Ten: Natural Phenomena and Their Timescales" with Gerard ’t Hooft (World Scientific, 2014; Dutch edition Veen Magazines, 2011). Notable awards include the Descartes-Huygens Prize (2008), NWO VICI laureate (2009-2016) for "Geometrical Aspects of Superstring Theory," Fellow of the Faculty of Science, University of Hasselt (2012), and Principal Investigator of the NWA Dutch Black Hole Consortium project (2021-2027, €5 million). Key publications comprise "Static nonextremal AdS4 black hole solutions" (JHEP 1209:048, 2012, with C. Toldo), "A 5d/2d/4d correspondence" (JHEP 1303:157, 2013, with B. Haghighat and J. Manschot), "Holographic models for undoped Weyl semimetals" (JHEP 1304:127, 2013, with U. Gürsoy et al.), "Four-dimensional black hole entropy from F-theory" (JHEP 08:043, 2019, with C. Couzens et al.), and "Towards a string realization of the Dark Dimension via T-folds" (JHEP 08, 2025, with G.E. Nian). He has taught courses including Quantum Field Theory, Special Relativity, and String Theory, supervised PhD students, and delivered lectures on black holes and supergravity at international schools.