Ed Corrigan has made many contributions to the gauge theories and string theories of elementary particles and to related aspects of mathematical physics. His early work laid some of the foundations of the modern theory of superstrings. He was one of the first to explore the properties of the magnetic monopole soliton-like objects, which necessarily occur in many gauge theories of elementary particles, and generalised the classic relation between electric and magnetic charges found by Paul Dirac. He pioneered the construction of multi-instanton solutions to gauge theories and also found expressions for Green’s functions in their background.

He has illuminated our understanding of how topological and group-theoretic ideas can be used to analyse the structure of quantum field theories. Recently, he has obtained beautiful results on the quantum field theory of certain systems whose integrability was previously understood at the classical level only.