SAN ANGELO, Texas — Angelo State University's 44th annual Distinguished Lectureship in Science Honoring Dr. Roy E. Moon will be held Tuesday, May 3, in the Houston Harte University Center, 1910 Rosemont Drive.
Dr. Alex Filippenko, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, will present.
Filippenko will give two public presentations:
- 2 p.m. - "Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe"
- 7 p.m. - "Einstein Triumphs: The Detection of Black Holes and Gravitational Waves"
Both presentations will take place in the University Center's C.J. Davidson Conference Center and are free and open to the public.
A California native, Filippenko is also a distinguished professor of astronomy and a senior fellow in the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. He is known for being the only person to be a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which both teams' leaders were awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
One of the world's most highly-cited astronomers, Filippenko's scientific accomplishments are documented in nearly 1,000 research papers. He has also given more than 1,000 public lectures and other presentations and he has appeared in over more than television documentaries, including approximately 50 episodes of "The Universe" on the History Channel.
He co-authored the award-winning astronomy textbook, "The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium," and has produced multiple astronomy video courses with The Great Courses.
For his work helping reveal the expansion of the universe, Filippenko was awarded the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He has also been awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization and the 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for undergraduate teaching.
He has won the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and has also been voted "Best Professor" on campus a record nine times. In 2006, he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions and he received the American Astronomical Society's Education Prize in 2022.
Filippenko was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
The Distinguished Lectureship in Science honors Dr. Roy E. Moon, a longtime San Angelo obstetrician and gynecologist, who died in 1976. He practiced for 28 years with Clinic Hospital Medical Associates, later West Texas Medical Associates. The lectureship was established in 1976. Each year, the lectureship brings a scientist of national prominence to ASU for public lectures and informal discussions.
For more information, call the ASU College of Science and Engineering at 325-942-2470.
