Laura Mersini-Houghton (née Mersini) is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[9] In January 2004, Mersini-Houghton accepted a position as assistant professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina.

[9] On 11 October 2010, Mersini-Houghton appeared in a BBC programme entitled What Happened Before the Big Bang (along with Michio Kaku, Neil Turok, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, and other physicists), where she propounded her theory of the universe as a wave function on the landscape multiverse.

[11] Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III.

[14] She claimed that Hawking radiation causes the star to shed mass at a rate such that it no longer has the density sufficient to create a black hole.