Horatiu Nastase is a Researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, São Paulo. To date, his career has spanned four continents. As an undergraduate he studied at Universitatea din Bucure?ti, Romania and University of Copenhagen. He later completed his Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where his collaboration with David Berenstein and Juan Maldacena defined the pp-wave correspondence. He has also held research and teaching positions at Brown University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.