Horatiu Nastase has a career which has spanned 4 continents. He holds a PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in string theory. During a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his work with Berenstein and Maldacena started the pp wave correspondence. After another postdoc and Brown University, and a tenure-track at Tokyo Tech in Japan, he is now a tenured Researcher at IFT-UNESP in Brazil.
Cosmology describes the evolution of the Universe and is based on a description of its beginning from quantum fluctuations. String theory is the only known consistent theory of quantum gravity that can deal with the highest energy scales near the Planck energy, relevant for cosmology's beginning. As a result, only string theory can give a fully consistent picture of cosmological origins. This book describes the best current avenues for obtaining cosmology from string theory. It is aimed at graduate students, and also researchers, with some familiarity with cosmology and string theory, however no detailed knowledge is required.