Tong grew up in Crawley, UK. He attended
Hazelwick School before undertaking his undergraduate studies in Mathematical Physics at the
University of Nottingham. He completed his MSc in Mathematics at
King's College London, and his PhD in Theoretical Physics at
Swansea University. He held research positions at the
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, at
King's College London and at
Columbia University. Between 2001 and 2004 he was a Pappalardo Fellow at
MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He joined the faculty at Cambridge in 2004. Tong works on quantum field theory and its application to different areas of physics. His early work was on
solitons and includes the discovery (with Amihay Hanany) of a vortex solution in
supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories. With
Eva Silverstein and Mohsen Alishahia, he proposed a new, predictive mechanism for cosmic inflation based on the
Dirac–Born–Infeld (DBI) action which helped motivate more systematic analyses of primordial non-Gaussianity. In work with Andreas Karch, he uncovered a web of dualities in 3d gauge theories. Tong is known for his widely watched videos on theoretical physics, including a
Royal Institution lecture on quantum field theory, and a
Quanta Magazine primer on the
Standard Model. == Textbooks ==