Donald Marolf

Donald Marolf is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He joined UCSB in 2003 after a faculty position at Syracuse University and served as Department Chair from 2016 to 2018. His research focuses on black holes, gravitational aspects of string theory, quantum gravity, entanglement entropy, and gauge/gravity dualities like AdS/CFT. He explores how bulk physics is encoded in gauge theory quantum states and investigates thermal transport in holographic systems.

• Education: PhD in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin (1992).
• Email: marolf@ucsb.edu | marolf@physics.ucsb.edu
• Research Grants: Supported by NSF Grant PHY-1125915.

Research Interests: Marolf’s work spans foundational questions in quantum gravity, including observables in toy models, gravitational energy, boundary conditions, and quantum fields in curved spacetime. He is renowned for refining the firewall paradox and studying baby universes, spacetime wormholes, and the order/disorder of black hole information. His recent articles analyze Euclidean wormholes, geometric entropies, gravitational Rényi entropies, and algebraic structures derived from path integrals.

Publication Trends: His 15 most recent articles (2023–2025) emphasize quantum gravity, holography, and entanglement. Topics include stability of gravitational path integrals, Ryu-Takayanagi/HRT entropy without holography, wormholes, black hole interiors, and constraints in quantum gravity. Subfields range from von Neumann algebras to DeWitt parameters and fixed-area states.