Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton (née Laura Mersini) is a theoretical physicist-cosmologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since January 2004. In 2009 she is on a sabbatical at DAMTP, University of Cambridge. Laura Mersini-Houghton received her undergraduate degree from the University of Tirana, Albania, her M.Sc. from the University of Maryland and was awarded a PhD in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She has worked on a variety of topics on the particle physics-cosmology interface. She was particularly interested in the possibility of generating dark energy from transplanckian physics in string theory, gravity and quantum field theory in curved space, and higher-dimension braneworlds.