College of Science lecture on March 15 to feature acclaimed astrophysicist

Alex Filippenko, an internationally recognized astrophysicist who was a part of two teams of scientists that discovered the universe’s accelerating expansion, will speak on March 15 as part of the College of Science’s Discover Science Lecture Series.

Filippenko will deliver his lecture, “Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe,” via Zoom at 2 p.m. 

Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley, was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team, which used observations of extragalactic supernovae to show the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, propelled by mysterious “dark energy.” 

Science magazine voted the discovery the top science breakthrough of 1998. The leaders of the two teams won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Filippenko is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won a share of both the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2009). He was the 2006 Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. In 2004, he received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

He has appeared in many television documentaries, including “The Universe,” “How the Universe Works,” “Space’s Deepest Secrets,” “Genius by Stephen Hawking” and “Nova.” The History Channel series, “The Universe,” frequently features him.

His lecture is free to faculty, staff and students. The link is https://clemson.zoom.us/j/99911544571.