Robert de Mello Koch is a Professor at the School of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand.
He holds the SARChI Chair in Fundamental Physics and String Theory. Prof De Mello Koch has been a Fellow at the Durham Institute for Advanced Studies in the UK, and at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. He is a Member of the associate faculty of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and is frequently a Visiting Lecturer of the High Energy Theory Group at Brown University.
Prof De Mello Koch's research focuses on understanding the duality between quantum gravity and Yang-Mills theories, by making novel use of group representation theory and the notion of Schur-Weyl duality.
He Co-Authored one of the first papers which use string theory techniques to compute QCD observables. Prof De Mello Koch has also worked on the problem of tachyon condensation in which the unstable bosonic 25-brane decays into a lower-dimensional brane. This work was featured as an ISI fast breaking paper.
