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Robert Kirshner is the Clowes Professor of Science in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the Large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of Supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.
In 1981, along with, Augustus Oemler, Jr., Paul Schechter, and Stephen Shectman, Kirshner discovered the Boötes void in a survey of galactic redshifts. Kirshner was a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team that used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe. This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy and was named the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine. For this work he was jointly awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007.
He is the author of The Extravagant Universe : Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998. He was the President of the American Astronomical Society from 2004-2006.
He received his A.B. magna cum laude in Astronomy from Harvard College in 1970, and his Ph.D., also in Astronomy, from Caltech. Prior to joining Harvard in 1985, he worked at Kitt Peak National Observatory and taught at the University of Michigan for 9 years.
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