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Alex Filippenko
An observational astronomer who makes frequent use of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck 10-meter telescopes, Filippenko's primary areas of research are exploding stars (supernovas), active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe. He and his collaborators recognized a new class of exploding star, obtained some of the best evidence for the existence of small black holes in our Milky Way Galaxy, and found that other galaxies commonly show vigorous activity in their centers that suggests the presence of supermassive black holes. His robotic telescope at Lick Observatory is the world's most successful search engine for nearby exploding stars, having discovered about 800 of them in the past decade. He was a member of both teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, propelled by mysterious "dark energy." This was voted the top "Science Breakthrough of 1998" by Science magazine, and the teams received the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their discovery. Filippenko's research accomplishments, documented in more than 600 published papers, have been recognized with several major awards, including the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1992), the Robert M. Petrie Prize of the Canadian Astronomical Society (1997), the Richtmyer Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers (2007), and election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (2009). He is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers. A Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, he has also been a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2001), a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar (2002), and a distinguished visiting lecturer at numerous colleges and universities. A dedicated and enthusiastic instructor, Filippenko has won the two most coveted teaching awards at UC Berkeley, each of which is generally given at most once per career. Also, he has been voted the "Best Professor" on campus six times (1995, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008). In 2006, he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral and research institutions. Filippenko has delivered more than 500 public lectures on astronomy to a very wide range of audiences. He has also played a prominent role in science newscasts and television documentaries such as "Mysteries of Deep Space," "Stephen Hawking's Universe," Nova's "Runaway Universe," and 23 episodes spanning four seasons of "The Universe" series on The History Channel. He coauthored an award-winning introductory astronomy textbook, "The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium," now in its third edition. Filippenko has produced four video courses with The Teaching Company, including a 96-lecture series on all of astronomy (2007), and a 12-lecture course on black holes (2009). He is the recipient of the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Besides being an avid tennis player and hiker, he enjoys world travel and is addicted to experiencing total solar eclipses, having seen 10 of them (out of 10 attempts) thus far. A science enthusiast for as long as he can remember, Filippenko's passion for astronomy began at age 14, when he accidentally "discovered" Saturn while viewing stars through a small telescope he received from his parents.
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Alex Filippenko received his bachelor's degree in Physics (1979) from the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and his doctorate in Astronomy (1984)
from the California Institute of Technology. He subsequently became a Miller
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1986 he
joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he has remained through the present
time. A member of the International Astronomical Union, he has served as
President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and as Councillor of the
American Astronomical Society.