Prof. David Gross joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in January 1997. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University in 1972, and later Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics.

In 2004, Prof. Gross shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with David Politzer and Frank Wilczek for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. With this discovery, Gross, Politzer and Wilczek have brought physics one step closer to fulfilling a grand dream, to formulate a unified theory comprising gravity as well––a unified theory for everything.

On 3 December 2006, Prof. David Gross visited the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to deliver a distinguished lecture, "The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics". The lecture evolved around the necessity to go beyond the standard model of particle physics and to understand quantum gravity has led to String Theory. This ambitious attempt to unify all the forces of nature and all forms of matter's different vibrations of a string-like object is still in a pre-revolutionary stage. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in the last decade in understanding the perturbative and non-perturbative structure of String Theory, we still lack a fundamental understanding of the theory. Many string theorists suspect that a profound conceptual change in our concept of space and time will be required for the final formulation of string theory.