Outline

SCALE: Strings & Cosmology – All Lengths Explored is a conference on the intersection of fundamental physics and cosmology taking place on May 11-15, 2026 at Hotel Landmar Playa La Arena in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. It is organized by Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT UAM–CSIC) in Madrid in collaboration with Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife. The goal is to foster a vibrant environment that connects communities working on diverse aspects of high-energy physics, string theory, and cosmology.

The conference aims to bring together researchers exploring the Universe across all scales, with a program that features a combination of overview talks, focused discussion sessions, flash talks, and poster presentations. The format is designed to encourage interactions and cross-disciplinary exchange, with the aim of highlighting the most promising directions in the fields and their intersection over the next decade. 

Each day of the conference will focus on a central theme:

• Mon, May 11 — The early Universe and spacetime symmetries
• Tue, May 12 — The cosmological constant problem and the late-time Universe
• Wed, May 13 — Bottom-up approaches to fundamental physics and cosmology
• Thu, May 14 — String theory and other top-down approaches
• Fri,   May 15 — Connections to observations

Keynote speakers

• Cliff Burgess (McMaster University & Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)
• Joseph Conlon (University of Oxford)
• Ed Copeland (University of Nottingham)
• Claudia de Rham (Imperial College London)
• Gia Dvali (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München & Max Planck Institute for Physics)
• Astrid Eichhorn (University of Heidelberg)
• Wendy Freedman (University of Chicago) *
• Lam Hui (Columbia University)
• Justin Khoury (University of Pennsylvania) 
• Elias Kiritsis (University of Crete & APC, Université Paris Cité)
• Lloyd Knox (University of California, Davis)
• Rocky Kolb (University of Chicago)
• Andrei Linde (Stanford University)
• Liam McAllister (Cornell University)
• Fernando Quevedo (University of Cambridge & NYU Abu Dhabi)
• Arman Shafieloo (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute)
• Gary Shiu (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
• Alessandra Silvestri (Leiden University)
• Glenn Starkman (Case Western Reserve University)
• Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University)
  ...

* TBC