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2024 Featured Speaker

Portrait of Dr. Alex Filippenko

Alex Filippenko, Ph.D.

University of California, Berkeley

Filippenko’s research specialty areas include active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and the expansion of the universe. He is best known for being the only person to be a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the universe. That revelation led to both teams’ leaders being awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, as well as all team members earning the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

An elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Filippenko is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists. His scientific accomplishments, documented in more than 1,100 research papers, have been recognized with numerous prizes and awards.

Dr. Alex Filippenko

In 2017, he was selected for one of only two Caltech Distinguished Alumni Awards. He has also won the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and been voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record nine times. In 2006, he was named the Case/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, and in 2022, he received the American Astronomical Society’s Education Prize.

Additionally, Filippenko has produced five video courses with “The Great Courses,” co-authored an award-winning astronomy textbook and appeared in more than 120 television documentaries. He has given over 1,000 public 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 experiencing total solar eclipses (19, with No. 20 coming up on April 8, 2024).

About the Lectureship

The Moon Lectureship brings a scientist of national prominence to the ASU campus each year for public lectures, colloquia and informal discussions. The academic or professional specialty of the scientist is to be in one of the basic sciences emphasized in the ASU curriculum or in an appropriate medical field.

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College of Science and Engineering