Alexei Filippenko

Alexei Filippenko
Born	Alexei Vladimir Filippenko (1958-07-25) July 25, 1958 Oakland, California, United States
Fields	Astrophysics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Education	University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A. 1979) California Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1984)
Thesis	Physical conditions in low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (1984)
Doctoral advisor	Wallace L. W. Sargent
Other academic advisors	Stanton J. Peale[1]
Known for	Type Ia supernova studies
Notable awards	Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy Guggenheim Fellowship
Spouse	Noelle Filippenko
Children	4
Website astroalex.org

Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko (/fɪlᵻˈpɛnkoʊ/; born July 25, 1958) is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He 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. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and was subsequently appointed to a faculty position at the same institution. He was later named a Miller Research Professor for Spring 1996 and Spring 2005. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths.

Research

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^[2] 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.^[5]

In the media

He is frequently featured in the History Channel series The Universe.

He is the author of and teacher in an eight-volume teaching series on DVD called Understanding the Universe.^[6] Organized into three major sections in ten smaller units, this series of 96 half-hour lectures covers the material of an undergraduate survey course for An Introduction to Astronomy (the series' subtitle).

With co-author Jay M. Pasachoff, Filippenko also wrote the award-winning introductory textbook The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium.^[7]

Honors and awards

Dr. Filippenko speaks at Menlo School

Filippenko was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. In 1997, the Canadian Astronomical Society invited him to give the Robert M. Petrie Prize Lecture for his significant contributions to astrophysical research. He was also invited to give the 42nd Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture in 2012. He was recognized in the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for his work with then Miller Postdoctoral Fellow Adam G. Riess and for his highly specialized contributions in measurement of the apparent brightness of distant supernovae, which accurately established the distances that support the conclusion of an increasingly rapid expansion of the universe.^[8] (Riess shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.)^[9] Filippenko was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. He shared the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt, Adam Riess, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team.

In addition to recognition for his scholarship, he has received numerous honors for his undergraduate teaching, including the 2007 Richtmyer Memorial Award given annually by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization by Wonderfest in 2004.^[10] 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).^[11] He also won the 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for excellence in college astronomy teaching, issued by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.^[12] His teaching awards at UC Berkeley include the Donald S. Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences^[13] and the Distinguished Teaching Award.^[14] The UC Berkeley student body has also voted him nine times as their "Best Professor" on campus.^[15]

Personal life

Alexei is married to Noelle and has four children, Zoe, "Scooby", Capri, and Orion.^[16]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alexei Filippenko.

• UC Berkeley Astronomy biography
• UC Berkeley Astronomy website
• Alexei Filippenko at the Internet Movie Database
• Introduction to General Astronomy – UC Berkeley Webcast
• Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe – UC Berkeley Webcast