Laura Mersini-Houghton is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one of many. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.
In 2014, Mersini-Houghton’s paper on black holes generated much discussion in the scientific community. This led to UNC-Chapel Hill co-sponsoring the Hawking Radiation Conference in Stockholm in 2015, initiated by Mersini-Houghton.
Mersini-Houghton has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill since 2004. She received a B.S. degree from the University of Tirana, Albania, and an M.Sc. from the University of Maryland. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. After earning her doctorate, Mersini-Houghton was a postdoctoral fellow at the Italian Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa from 2000 to 2002. In 2002, she had a postdoctoral fellowship for two years at Syracuse University.