Adam Riess
Adam Guy Riess ( born December 16, 1969 in Washington, DC) is an American astronomer whose research deals with the use of supernovae as cosmological distance scales. In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Riess was born in a Jewish family. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( bachelor's degree in 1992 ) and received his doctoral degree Ph.D. 1996 at Harvard University with a thesis on type I supernovae, supervised by Robert Kirshner. From 1992 he worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Riess was part of Brian Schmidt High -z Supernova Search Team, one of the two groups, which demonstrated the end of the 1990s by means of supernovae that the universe is expanding faster. Riess went in 1996 ( as a Miller Fellow ) at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1999 to 2005 as a Senior Staff Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Since 2006 he is professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.
With the Hubble Space Telescope, he pursued a search program by supernovae at even higher redshift, which goes back to the previous delayed expansion phase of the universe.
Since 2008 he is member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, since 2009, the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he was awarded jointly to Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt of the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe was appreciated by observing distant supernovae.
His grandfather was the 1933 Würzburg emigrated to America and later lived in Switzerland German - Jewish writer Curt Riess ( 1902-1993 ).
Awards
- 2002: Helen B. Warner Prize
- 2006: Shaw Prize
- 2008: MacArthur Fellowship
- 2011: Albert Einstein Medal
- 2011: Nobel Prize in Physics