My research is primarily concerned with the application of gauge/gravity duality to strongly coupled and correlated real-world systems such as the quark-gluon plasma, the high temperature cuprate superconductors, or the fractional quantum hall effect. These systems, involving fermions, mostly are not accessible by traditional methods such as lattice gauge theory or the usual approximations in condensed matter physics, and their physics hence remains elusive. The goal of my research is to use gauge/gravity duality, a string-theory inspired reformulation of such strongly coupled and correlated problems in terms of gravitational degrees of freedom, to gain new insight into the dynamics of these problems or, with a bit of luck, to even solve these systems completely.