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Alexei Vladimir " Alex" Filippenko (; born July 25, 1958) is an American astrophysics and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he was a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on and active galaxy at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe.
Filippenko developed and runs the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), a fully robotic telescope which conducts the Lick Observatory (LOSS). During the years 1998–2008, it was by far the world's most successful search for relatively nearby supernovae, finding over 650 of them.
His research, concentrating on optical spectroscopy, showed that many core-collapse supernovae result from massive stars with partially or highly stripped envelopes, helped establish the Type IIn subclass characterized by ejecta interacting with circumstellar gas, observationally identified the progenitors of some supernovae, revealed that many supernovae are quite aspherical, and showed that Type Ia supernovae exhibit considerable heterogeneity—crucial to the development of methods to calibrate them for accurate distance determinations.
Filippenko's early work showed that the nuclei of most bright, nearby galaxies exhibit activity physically similar to that of quasars, driven by gas accretion onto a supermassive black hole. He is also a member of the Nuker Team which uses the Hubble Space Telescope to examine supermassive black holes and determined the relationship between a galaxy's central black hole's mass and velocity dispersion. In half a dozen X-ray binary stars, he provided compelling dynamical evidence for a stellar-mass black hole. His robotic telescope (KAIT) made some of the very earliest measurements of the optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts.
The Thompson-Reuters "incites" index ranked Filippenko as the most cited researcher in space science for the ten-year period between 1996 and 2006.
Filippenko is the author of and teacher in an eight-volume teaching series on DVD called Understanding the Universe. Organized into three major sections in ten smaller units, this series of 96 half-hour lectures covers the material of an undergraduate survey course for An Introduction to Astronomy (the series' subtitle). His other videos courses are Black Holes Explained and Skywatching: Seeing and Understanding Cosmic Wonders.
With co-author Jay Pasachoff, Filippenko also wrote the award-winning introductory textbook The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, now in its fifth edition (2019).
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine: in 2009, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. In 2021 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. He shared the
2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt, Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Supernova Cosmology Project.
In addition to recognition for his scholarship, he has received numerous honors for his undergraduate teaching and public outreach, including the 2007 Richtmyer Memorial Award given annually by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization by Wonderfest in 2004. In 2006 Filippenko was awarded the US National Professor of the Year Award, sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and administered by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). He also won the 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for excellence in college astronomy teaching, issued by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In 2022, he was awarded the American Astronomical Society's Education Prize. His teaching awards at Berkeley include the Donald S. Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences as well as other awards recognizing his undergraduate instruction and mentorship. Donald Noyce Prize page UC Berkeley. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-17. Distinguished Teaching Award page UC Berkeley. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-17. The Berkeley student body has also voted him nine times as the university's "Best Professor".
He served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific from 2001 to 2003. In 1988, he was selected for a UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2017 he received a Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2021, he became an elected fellow of the American Astronomical Society, and in 2022, the society awarded him the AAS Education Prize.
After briefly apologizing in a hastily written email message sent from his iPhone, Filippenko later issued a longer statement. There, he appears to sincerely apologize for not editing Faber's message before forwarding it, explaining that he had been busy in an administrative meeting at that time and had not carefully read her message. He explicitly acknowledges the “insensitive and inflammatory” language that had been used in Faber's message, saying that he had meant to write “I support the petition” instead of “I support what Faber says.” Filippenko's statement also argues against the anti-TMT position of many Native Hawaiians, claiming good-faith negotiations with Native Hawaiians communities, and otherwise justifying the siting of the TMT over some Native Hawaiian objection to further desecration of a site sacred to them. Such sentiments have been expressed by many others as well. The American Astronomical Society issued a statement reiterating its formal anti-racist stance and noted the disagreement over whether Filippenko's apology was indeed "sincere and unqualified." Both Faber and Filippenko have refused media requests for comment since the incident.
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