Sakura Schafer-Nameki is a Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Oxford. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. She became a postdoc at the University of Hamburg and subsequently was a John A McCone Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.
She took up a five year postdoc at KITP, University of Santa Barbara, in 2009, before moving for a permanent post to King’s College London in 2010. Since 2016, she has been a Professor at Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

Schafer-Nameki’s research area is at the intersection of string theory and geometry, with a focus on the relation of quantum field theories realized within string theory and the manifestation of their properties within geometry. She has made important contributions to the properties of Calabi-Yau three- and four-folds in M/F-theory compactifications. She has explored the role of exceptional holonomy spaces in string theory as well as the theories obtained by compactifications of branes on calibrated cycles. Schafer-Nameki is also an expert on holography between conformal field theories and string theories on anti-deSitter spacetimes. She holds an ERC Consolidator Grant.