Alexei V. Filippenko

Alex Filippenko was born in Oakland, California, in 1958. His parents, both emigrés from then-Yugoslavia by way of Germany, were stalwarts in their respective intellectual communities. His father was a mathematician who did his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and his mother was the Serbian librarian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Filippenko traces his interest in science to the sandbox, literally; he recalls as a child using magnets to extract iron particles from among the silicate grains, sparking an interest in magnetism. His studies soon broadened to insects, then amoebas and paramecia under the microscope, then electronics kits, and then chemistry. In his first year of high school, however, he realized that he hadn’t thought about the Universe on a macroscopic scale. For Christmas that year, he asked his parents for a telescope, and so, on December 24, 1972, Alex Filippenko “discovered Saturn all on my own.” The lesson he learned was that if he could get “such a great rush” out of that experience, “what a truly amazing thrill it must be as a scientist to really discover something for the first time in all of humanity.” Although he entered college as a chemistry major, his growing interest in astronomy, along with several unintended chemical explosions that could have cost him his eyesight had he not been wearing glasses, prompted his switch to physics with the intention of becoming an astrophysicist.

Filippenko received his bachelor’s degree in physics in June 1979 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, working under the tutelage of astrophysicist Stanton Peale, who remained a lifelong friend and introduced him to the glory of viewing total solar eclipses (Filippenko has chased 20 of them). In May 1984 Filippenko received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology, working under the direction of Wallace Sargent. Later that year he became a Miller Fellow for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley, working primarily with Hyron Spinrad; he was hired on the Berkeley faculty in 1986 and has remained there ever since, today as a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and the Class of 1954 Chair.

Filippenko’s many honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He was named an American Astronomical Society Fellow in 2021; the following year he received the AAS’s Education Prize. As a member of both the High-Z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project he was a co-recipient of the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He received a 2001 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. In 2025, he was also appointed as a Hagler Fellow at Texas A&M University. Nine times the students at UC Berkeley have voted him “Best Professor,” and in 2006 he was chosen as the CASE/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral and research institutions.