About Alex Filippenko
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko 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 postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he was a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe. Filippenko was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. The discovery was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine and resulted in the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to the leaders of the two project teams. In 2006 Filippenko was awarded the US National 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).
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