Alex Filippenko received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Caltech in 1984 and joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1986, where he is currently the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. An observational astronomer who makes frequent use of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck 10-meter telescopes, his primary areas of research are supernovae, active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences and one of the world's most highly cited astronomers, he has coauthored more than 640 scientific publications and is the recipient of numerous prizes for his research. He was a member of both teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, propelled by mysterious "dark energy."

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