Jonathan Mboyo Esole’s research explores the geometry of string theory, particularly F-theory and elliptic fibrations at the interface of physics and mathematics. Born in Kinshasa, he studied at the Free University of Brussels, graduating summa cum laude in 2001 with a prize for the best thesis in the Faculty of Sciences. He pursued doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and earned his PhD from Leiden University, working on cosmic strings, before holding positions at Stanford University and KU Leuven, where he was a Marie Curie Fellow.
Dr. Esole joined Harvard University as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2008 and became a Benjamin Peirce Fellow in the Department of Mathematics in 2013, working with Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau, where his work opened the door to the systematic use of crepant resolutions of singularities in F-theory. He joined Northeastern in 2016, supported by a National Science Foundation grant for his research on elliptic fibrations and string theory.
In 2017, Dr. Esole was named a NextEinstein Forum Fellow, an award celebrating the best young African scientists.