Effective Supergravity from the Weakly Coupled Heterotic String

The motivation for Calabi-Yau-like compactifications of the weakly coupled $E_8\otimes E_8$ heterotic string theory, its particle spectrum and the issue of dilaton stabilization are briefly reviewed. Modular invariant models for hidden sector condensation and supersymmetry breaking are described at the quantum level of the effective field theory. Their phenomenological and cosmological implications, including a possible origin for R-parity, are discussed.