Current Recipient

Dr. Saul Perlmutter

Dr. Joseph Z. Dickson, a Pittsburgh physician, and his wife, Agnes Fisher Dickson, provided funds in their wills for Carnegie Mellon University to award an annual prize to individuals who make outstanding contributions to science in the United States.

This year’s Dickson Prize awardee, Saul Perlmutter, is one of the world’s premier astrophysicists.He is leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project, an international collaboration of research teams from seven countries who are measuring the expansion history of the universe. The group is best known for its revolutionary findings that established that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The observations, which implied the existence of Einstein’s cosmological constant, were named Science Magazine’s 1998 Breakthrough of the Year.

Perlmutter is a professor in the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Physics and a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the E.O. Lawrence Award in Physics from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Henri Chretien Award from the American Astronomical Society and the International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize. He shared the Padua Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the Gruber Cosmology Prize. Perlmutter is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A prolific author, Perlmutter has written more than 100 papers in the field of physics, astrophysics and cosmology, addressing such topics as the cosmological constant, dark energy, supernovae, pulsars, gravitational lenses, massive compact halo objects and advanced detector systems for astrophysics.