The Surprising Expansion History of the Universe

Adam Riess
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
6pm - 7pm Reception | 7pm - 8pm Talk
UC Davis Conference Center Ballroom RSVP Here

Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, 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 in 1992 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars).

Currently, he leads the SHOES Team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the HIgher-z Team to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known, in order to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.

In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership in 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. The discovery was named by Science magazine in 1998 as "the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year."

His accomplishments have been recognized with a number of other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2007 (shared), and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006.

Professor Riess will describe his team's measurements that reveal how the expansion of space has unfolded over time, and explain why they are surprising. This work was recognized with the 2011 Nobel prize in physics and more recently has led to yet another surprising result. Both of these findings remain major drivers of the cosmology community's attempts to understand the cosmos and the fundamental laws of nature.

Published: March 4, 2025, 9:03 pm