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Alex Filippenko is the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored or co-authored over 1120 research papers and has received several major awards, including the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007 and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2015. Filippenko is recognized as one of the world's highly cited astronomers and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He became a fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2021 and received the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017. Filippenko has won numerous teaching awards, including being voted “Best Professor” at UC Berkeley multiple times. He has produced five astronomy video courses for “The Great Courses” and has co-authored an award-winning astronomy textbook. His research interests include the study of supernovae and their progenitor stars, as well as cosmological distance indicators. He is involved in various observational campaigns using instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, contributing to the understanding of dark energy and the expansion of the universe.
University of California, Berkeley • Berkeley, CA
Distinguished Professor in the Astronomy Department.
The Mathematics Subject GRE is required for the Fall 2026 admissions cycle. General GRE is optional.