Alex Filippenko

Alex Filippenko is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. An elected member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists. His scientific accomplishments, documented in nearly 1200 research papers, have been recognized with numerous prizes. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders, as well as the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted by students the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 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. He has produced 5 video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 120 television documentaries. He will be giving a series of lectures on astronomy and other science topics during the North Pole Forum. An avid tennis player, runner, hiker, skier, whitewater rafter, snorkeler, and scuba diver, he enjoys world travel and experiencing total solar eclipses (20, so far). He ran the Honolulu Marathon twice about two decades ago, and he is looking forward to running the North Pole Marathon.