Alex Filippenko

Filippenko was born in Oakland, California, in 1958.⁠[1]

As a youth he developed his interest in astronomy at the Goleta Boys & Girls Club in California.⁠[2]

He received a B.A. in physics from UC Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech in 1984.⁠[3]

He was a 1979 Hertz Fellow, and his doctoral thesis was titled Physical Conditions in Low-Luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei.⁠[4]

In the year of his doctorate he became a Miller Fellow for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley, and he was hired onto the Berkeley faculty in 1986.⁠[1]

He became assistant professor of astronomy at Berkeley in 1987, associate professor in 1988 and professor in 1992.⁠[5]

He received Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for undergraduate teaching in 1991, and the American Astronomical Society’s Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in 1992.⁠[5]

The 30-inch robotic Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), whose seven-year construction he led, was to be dedicated at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton on October 25, 1996, to search full-time for supernovae; it was named for the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation, which donated $50,000.⁠[6]

He published the review “Optical Spectra of Supernovae” in volume 35 of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, surveying the optical spectra of supernovae and the temporal evolution of their major classes and subclasses.⁠[7]

He has recalled obtaining many spectra of high-redshift Type Ia supernova candidates with Keck Observatory in the mid-1990s.⁠[8]

In May 1998 the High-z Supernova Search Team submitted “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant,” with him as second author; it found that the high-redshift supernova data favour eternally expanding models with a positive cosmological constant.⁠[9]

He was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2001 and a Miller Professor at Berkeley in 1996 and 2005.⁠[10]

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE named him national Professor of the Year in the doctoral and research universities category; his introductory astronomy class drew 750 to 800 students per semester.⁠[10]

The American Association of Physics Teachers presented him with its Richtmyer Memorial Award at its annual meeting in Seattle; he had received the Carl Sagan Prize in 2004.⁠[3]

The 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize of $500,000 went to Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt and their teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team; he appears on the member lists of both teams.⁠[11]

In April 2009 he was one of seven UC Berkeley faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[12]

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess; at the time of the 1998 discovery Riess was a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley working with Filippenko, who at different times was a member of both teams.⁠[13]

He received a share of the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.⁠[14]

The same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[15]

He appeared as the guest of episode 137 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing cosmic expansion and dark energy, asteroid impacts, solar flares, exoplanets, extraterrestrial life and the Fermi paradox, the Nobel Prize for the accelerating universe, and supernovae.⁠[16]

The American Astronomical Society gave him its 2022 Education Prize for his teaching of non-science majors, mentoring hundreds of teaching assistants and undergraduate researchers, public education through lectures and documentaries, and his leadership in saving Lick Observatory when it faced defunding in 2014.⁠[17]

The 2026 Gruber Cosmology Prize went to him, Ken'ichi Nomoto and Stanford E. Woosley, who split $500,000, for turning supernovae into the basis for a quantitative, predictive and empirically validated framework; the release said his observations helped identify three Type I subcategories, including Type Ia, and that he conceived the Lick Observatory Supernova Search.⁠[18]

He is Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley, Class of 1954 Chair and Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences, with work documented in more than 1,240 research papers; KAIT, developed by his group, has discovered more than 1,000 relatively nearby supernovae.⁠[14]

His courses for The Great Courses include Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, Black Holes Explained, and Skywatching: Seeing and Understanding Cosmic Wonders.⁠[19]

UC Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]