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Robert Kirshner

Center for Astrophysics
Clowes Research Professor of Astronomy

About

Robert Kirshner has been on the Harvard faculty since 1985, formerly Department Chair, OIR Division Director, Harvard College Professor, and Master of Quincy House. He is now the Clowes Research Professor of Science. In 2015, he moved to California, where he is the Chief Program Officer for Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, in charge of $100 M per year of grants for basic science research. Kirshner is a coauthor of 392 refereed articles on ADS and his work, principally on supernovae and their application to cosmology has been cited 58,596 times. Among other honors, he has been awarded two Honorary Doctor of Science degrees, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the National Academy’s James Craig Watson Medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize in Astrophysics and a Bowdoin Prize for useful and polite literature. Kirshner is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as President of the American Astronomical Society.

A.B. Harvard College, 1970; Ph.D. Caltech 1975;