Adam Riess, PhD

Dr. Adam G. Riess is a Distinguished Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the Johns Hopkins University. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). In 1998, Dr. Riess led a study for the High-z Team which provided the first direct and published evidence that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating and filled with Dark Energy (Riess et al. 1998, AJ, 116, 1009). This discovery, together with the Supernova Cosmology Project's result, was called the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year by Science Magazine in 1998. 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 this study. 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 to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.