Laurent Freidel is a French theoretical physicist and mathematical physicist known mainly for his contributions to quantum gravity, including loop quantum gravity, spin foam models, doubly special relativity, group field theory, relative locality and most recently metastring theory.
He is currently a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
He stayed at ENSL officially as a research scientist for 12 years, until 2006.
[1] In 2011 Freidel published a paper with Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman and Lee Smolin introducing the principle of relative locality, a proposed generalization of the principle of relativity in which different observers see different notions of spacetimes.
[4] Between 2013 and 2015 he published a series of papers with Robert Leigh and Djordje Minic introducing a new formulation of string theory, metastring theory, which implements the notion of relative locality in a precise way and introduces a new notion of modular spacetime.