Adam Riess

Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and the Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He is a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars), and he leads the Supernova H0 for Equation of State (SHOES) Team’s efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant. In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership of the High-z Supernova Search Team’s discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe. His accomplishments have been recognized with numerous other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.