Alexei Filippenko

Alexei Filippenko
Born	July 25, 1958 (1958-07-25) Oakland, California, USA
Fields	Astrophysics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A. California Institute of Technology, Ph.D.
Known for	Type Ia Supernova Studies
Notable awards	Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy Guggenheim Fellowship

Alexei Vladimir Filippenko (born July 25, 1958, Oakland, California) is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths.

Research

Filippenko was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team that used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe. This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy and was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine.

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. The Thompson-Reuters "incites" index ranked Filippenko as the most cited researcher in space science for the ten year period between 1996 and 2006.

In the media

He is frequently featured on History Channel's "The Universe" programs.

Honours and awards

Filippenko was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. In addition to recognition for his scholarship, he has received numerous honors for his undergraduate teaching, including the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization by Wonderfest in 2004. In 2006 Filippenko was awarded the US Professor of the Year Award, sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and administered by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Filippenko won the 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for excellence in college astronomy teaching, issued by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

External links

• Alexei Filippenko official webpage
• Introduction to General Astronomy – UC Berkeley Webcast
• Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe – UC Berkeley Webcast