Physics & Astronomy Public Lecture: "Supernovae and the Discovery of the Accelerating Universe"

The new Distinguished Lecture Series in Physics and Astronomy, sponsored by the USC Provost and the Vice President for Research, continues in Spring 2017. Each distinguished guest will give a public lecture, touching on exciting topics at the forefront of physics and astronomy and accessible to a broad public audience.

Dr. Adam Riess is the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, 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 Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996. 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.

This special public lecture will be held in the W.W. Hootie Johnson Performance Hall of the Darla Moore School of Business (Room #101) at 1014 Greene Street.