Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter (born 1959) is an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. [http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/04/30_aaas.shtml] , and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is of Jewish descent.

Education

Perlmutter graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis was on searching for Nemesis candidates under Richard A. Muller.

Work

Perlmutter heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was this team along with the High-z Supernova Search Team which found evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is also a lead investigator in the Supernova/Acceleration Probe project.

Perlmutter currently teaches at the UC Berkeley.

Awards

In 2002 Perlmutter won the Department of Energy's E. O. Lawrence Award in Physics. In 2003 he was awarded the California Scientist of the Year Award, and in 2005 he won the John Scott Award and the Padua Prize. In 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, as well as winning the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize.

Perlmutter and his team shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe.

See also

* Cosmological constant
* Dark energy
* Dark matter

External links

* [http://www.oarval.org/SCPen.htm Supernova Cosmology Project]
* [http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-Shaw-prize.html Shaw Prize Press Release]