Alex Filippenko

Alex Filippenko is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. His accomplishments, documented in about 1,200 research papers, have been recognized by several major prizes, including a share of both the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015). 

One of the world’s most highly cited astronomers, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015), as well as an elected American Astronomical Society (AAS) Fellow (2021). He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, an amazing discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders. 

In 2017, he was selected for the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award. He has won the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and has also been voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times. Selected in 2006 as the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, he has also received the Richard H. Emmons Award for undergraduate teaching (2010) and the AAS Education Prize (2022). 

He produced five astronomy video courses with “The Great Courses,” coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook (5 editions), and appears in more than 120 TV documentaries, including about 50 episodes of “The Universe” series. He has given over 1500 public lectures or other presentations, and he was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. 

An avid tennis player, runner, hiker, skier, whitewater rafter, snorkeler, and scuba diver, he enjoys world travel and spending time with his family. One of his passions is observing total solar eclipses, having experienced 20 of them so far.