Alex Filippenko

Alex Filippenko is the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. His accomplishments, documented in more than 800 research papers, have been recognized by several major prizes, including a share of both the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015). One of the world's most highly cited astronomers, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015). He has won the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and has also been voted the "Best Professor" on campus a record 9 times. Selected in 2006 as the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, he has also received the Richard H. Emmons Award for undergraduate teaching (2010). He produced five astronomy video courses with "The Great Courses" (see below), coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 100 TV documentaries, including about 50 episodes of "The Universe" series. He has given nearly 1000 public lectures or other presentations, was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, and received the prestigious Hertz Foundation fellowship for his PhD studies at The California Institute of Technology.

Filippenko is the only person who was a member of both the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team, which used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe and its implied existence of dark energy. The discovery was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine] and resulted in the 2011 Nobel prize for physics being awarded to the leaders of the two project teams.

Filippenko developed and runs the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), a fully robotic telescope which conducts the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS), the most successful nearby supernova search. He is also a member of the Nuker Team which uses the Hubble space telescope to examine supermassive black holes and determined the relationship between a galaxy's central black hole's mass and velocity dispersion.[3][4] The Thompson-Reuters "incites" index ranked Filippenko as the most cited researcher in space science for the ten-year period between 1996 and 2006