Abraham Loeb

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts ~Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science. Chair, Department of Astronomy; Director, Institute for Theory and Computation; Director, Black Hole Center; Science Theory Director, Breakthrough Prize Foundation. Selected among the 25 most influential people in Space by TIME magazine (2012). Leader in a range of research areas in astrophysics and cosmology, including the first stars; the epoch of reionization; the formation and evolution of massive black holes; gravitational lensing by planets; gamma-ray bursts (grbs) at high redshifts; 21 cm cosmology; the use of the Lyman-alpha forest to measure the acceleration/deceleration of the universe in real time; the future collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies; the future state of extragalactic astronomy; the astrophysical implications of black hole recoil in galaxy mergers; and imaging black hole silhouettes. Authored over 500 papers, including work on planet microlensing, high-redshift grbs, and 21 cm cosmology, that helped establish these subjects as major areas for investigation by astrophysicists. Among the first to consider the cosmic dawn of the first stars and galaxies of the young universe. Author of the books: How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? (2010), The First Galaxies in the Universe (2013), and From the First Star to Milkomeda (2015). Delivered numerous invited lectures, including the Salpeter Lectures at Cornell University, the Bahcall Lecture at Tel Aviv University, the Merle Kingsley Lecture at the California Institute of Technology, the Australian Institute of Physics Lectureship at the University of Melbourne, the Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at the Carnegie Observatories, the Las Cumbres Observatory Lectureship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Sackler Lectureship at the Leiden Observatory.~