Anamaría Font

Anamaría Font Villarroel is a Venezuelan theoretical physicist and professor of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). Her research has been focused on models about the primordial components of matter in the context of string theory.

Font has contributed to development of Calabi–Yau dimensional compactification and she introduced the concept of S-duality to superstring theory, contributing to the second superstring revolution.

Early life and education
Anamaría Font Villarroel was born in Anaco, Venezuela. She obtained her bachelor's degree in physics, Cum Laude in 1980 from Simon Bolivar University, in Caracas, Venezuela.

Academic career
Font received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987, under the supervision of Austin Gleeson. Her PhD thesis was titled Four-Dimensional Supergravity Theories Arising from Superstrings. While pursuing her PhD, she received classes from Nobel Prize physicist Steven Weinberg. After completing her PhD she moved to France to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Annecy-le-Vieux Particle Physics Laboratory (LAPP). Since 1989, she has been a physics professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela. She was also a visiting professor at the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for theoretical physics in Munich, Germany.

Her article titled "Strong-weak coupling duality and non-perturbative effects in string theory" had a big influence in the second superstring revolution in 1995. It was in this article where the term S-duality was first used in this context.

In 2013, Font was elected a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for the advancement of science in developing countries.

Font has been actively involved in projects related to education in physics and mathematics in Venezuela and other countries. In July 2018, Physics Today magazine published an interview with Font about the status of science in Venezuela. The publication data base INSPIRE-HEP included three of her notorious publications into their data base.

She is a member of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD).

Font is also a Severo Ochoa IFT (Instituto de Física Teórica) research associate.

Honors and awards
In 1991, Font was awarded the Lorenzo Mendoza Fleury Science Prize. Given by the country's national private industry, the prize recognizes the work of Venezuelan scientists, and is the most important scientific prize in Venezuela.

In 1998, she was awarded, jointly with Fernando Quevedo, the ICTP Prize in the field of High Energy Physics (in honour of Chen Ning Yang),

""for their contribution to the phenomenological studies in superstring theory based on orbifold compactifications and many works on Calabi–Yau compactifications, mirror symmetry and duality symmetries. These works have contributed to a greater understanding of the low energy string physics, as well as various stringy symmetries. In particular, the important concept of S-duality has been introduced by them and their collaborators.""

In 2023, Font was awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards, representing Latin America,

"recognized for her important contributions in theoretical particle physics, in particular to the study of String Theory. Her research has furthered the theory's implications for the structure of matter and quantum gravity, which is also relevant to the description of black holes and the first instants after the big bang"

In November 2023, Font was named to the BBC's 100 Women list.

Selected publications
Font has more than 50 publications with over 6000 citations. Below is a list of some of her publications.