Emil John Martinec (born 1958) is an American string theorist, a physics professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and director of the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics.
He was part of a group at Princeton University that developed heterotic string theory in 1985.
Early in his career, Martinec worked at Princeton University, where he was part of a research group known as the "Princeton string quartet" that also included physicists David Gross, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Ryan Rohm.
This work was part of a series of advances that forestalled the predicted merger of cosmology and fundamental physics.
[7] Martinec is co-author of six papers that SLAC's inSPIRE database classifies as "renowned" (having 500 or more citations apiece):[8]