Lakeland College

"Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe"
Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012
Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy and the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
Alex Filippenko, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the world's most highly-cited astronomers. He is the recipient of numerous prizes for his scientific research, and was a member of the teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which will be the subject of his Lakeland presentation. This discovery was voted the "Top Science Breakthrough of 1998" by Science magazine and received the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Filippenko was voted the "Best Professor" on campus a record eight times and was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year in 2006. He has produced several astronomy video courses for The Teaching Company, and appears in numerous television documentaries, including dozens of episodes in "The Universe" series on The History Channel.