21 Facts About Adam Riess

1.

Adam Guy Riess was born on December 16,1969 and is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

2.

Adam Riess is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes.

3.

Adam Riess grew up in Warren, New Jersey, where his father owned a frozen-foods distribution company, Bistro International, and his mother worked as a clinical psychologist.

4.

Michael Adam Riess immigrated to the United States with his parents from Germany on the ship SS Europa in 1936.

5.

Adam Riess attended Watchung Hills Regional High School, graduating in the class of 1988.

6.

Adam Riess attended the prestigious New Jersey Governor's School in the Sciences in 1987.

7.

Adam Riess then graduated from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

8.

Adam Riess received his PhD from Harvard University in 1996; it resulted in measurements of over twenty new Type Ia supernovae and a method to utilize Type Ia supernovae as accurate distance indicators by correcting for intervening dust and intrinsic inhomogeneities.

9.

Adam Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1996 through 1999, during which period his first seminal paper on the discovery of an accelerating universe was published.

10.

Adam Riess sits on the selection committee for the Astronomy award, given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize.

11.

In July 2016, Adam Riess was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars.

12.

Adam Riess jointly led the study with Brian Schmidt in 1998 for the High-z Supernova Search Team which first reported evidence that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating through monitoring of Type Ia supernovae.

13.

The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science magazine in 1998, and Adam Riess was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Schmidt and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.

14.

Adam Riess won the American Astronomical Society's Helen B Warner Prize in 2003 and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in 2004 for the discovery of cosmic acceleration.

15.

Adam Riess was the winner of MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2008.

16.

Adam Riess was elected in 2009 to the National Academy of Sciences.

17.

In 2012, Adam Riess received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

18.

In 2020, Adam Riess was made fellow of the American Astronomical Society.

19.

Adam Riess participated on the NPR radio quiz program Wait Wait.

20.

Adam Riess has more than 87,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 99.

21.

Adam Riess's most cited work, "Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant," has been cited over 20,000 times.