This Iranian-American developed a branch of string theory allowing theorists to construct new vacua?
F-theory:  The new vacua described by F-theory were discovered by Vafa and allowed string theorists to construct new realistic vacua — in the form of F-theory compactified on elliptically fibered Calabi–Yau four-folds. Cumrun Vafa: Cumrun Vafa (Persian: کامران وفا‎ ‎ ] ; born 1960) is an Iranian-American string theorist from Harvard University, which he first joined as a Harvard Junior Fellow.
Cumrun Vafa