 In 1975 he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics, now named C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, of the Stony Brook University, where he succeeded Nobel laureate C. N. Yang as its director from 1999 till 2002.He is married to Marie de Crombrugghe, and they have three children.For constructing supergravity, the first supersymmetric extension of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and for their central role in its subsequent development
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, Sergio Ferrara and Daniel Z. Freedman received in 1993 the Dirac medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (Italy), in 2006 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics of the American Physical Society and in 2016 the Ettore Majorana Medal from EMFCSC, Erice.