Cumrun Vafa (Persian: کامران وفا, Persian pronunciation: [kɒːmˈrɒːn væˈfɒː]; born 1 August 1960) is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University.

[2] He graduated from Alborz High School in Tehran and moved to the United States in 1977 to study at university.

He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1985 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Symmetries, inequalities and index theorems", under the supervision of Edward Witten.

[11] He is the recipient of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)'s, 2008 Dirac Medal, which was won alongside Juan Maldacena, and Joseph Polchinski for their advancement of string theory.

[13] Vafa has co-authored and published more than 300 research articles in the fields of string theory, mathematics, and physics, with many other researchers including: Robbert Dijkgraaf, Hirosi Ooguri, Mina Aganagic, Sergei Gukov, Rajesh Gopakumar, Lotte Hollands, and many others.