“It’s amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time.”
Alex Filippenko, an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists. His scientific accomplishments, documented in nearly 1000 published research papers, have been recognized with numerous prizes. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that in 1998 revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders, as well as the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. In 2017, he was selected for one of only two Caltech Distinguished Alumnus Awards. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times, in 2006 he was named the Case/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. He has produced 5 astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 120 television documentaries. He has given over 1000 public presentations, and he was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. An avid tennis player, hiker, runner, skier, whitewater rafter, snorkeler, and scuba diver, he enjoys spending time with his family, traveling throughout the world (when not under Covid-19 restrictions), and experiencing total solar eclipses (17 so far).
Alex Filippenko 