Adam G. Riess Biography

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist at The Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California Berkeley before moving on to the Space Telescope Science Institute in 1999. He took up his current position at Johns Hopkins University in 2005.

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 now accelerating though monitoring of Type 1a Supernova. The team's observations were contrary to the current theory that the expansion of the universe was slowing down; instead by monitoring the color shifts in the light from the supernova from Earth they discovered that these billion-year old nova were still accelerating. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe such as the existence of dark matter. The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science Magazine in 1998 and Riess was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Schmidt and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.