Alexei V. Filippenko

Alexei Filippenko is Professor of Astronomy and the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His research group has developed the 0.76-meter Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at the Lick Observatory, which is conducting one of the world’s most successful searches for relatively nearby supernovae (exploding stars).  With his collaborators, he is determining the nature of the progenitor stars and the explosion mechanisms of different types of supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. He is also using supernovae as cosmological distance indicators. He was a member of both teams that revealed in 1998 the accelerating expansion of the Universe (which is probably propelled by mysterious “dark energy”), a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders. He also works on quantifying the physical properties of quasars and active galaxies, as well as searching for stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes. He was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times, he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year in 2006. He has produced 5 astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning college astronomy textbook, and appears in about 100 TV documentaries. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.