Harlow was born in
Cincinnati and grew up in
Boston and
Chicago. He received his B.A. from
Columbia University in 2006 and his Ph.D. from
Stanford University in 2012. Before joining MIT's faculty in July 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at
Princeton University and
Harvard University. His research is focused on understanding black holes and cosmology, viewed through the lens of quantum field theory and quantum gravity. Harlow won the
New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2019 for "fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity." He was also named a
Sloan Research Fellow in 2019, and in 2020, he was named a
Packard Fellow. == Personal life ==