Sam Spade's San Francisco

What: A Benjamin Dean Lecture: The Dark Universe and the Origin of Structure at the California Academy of Sciences at
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Who: Josh Frieman, Ph.D.
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Where: Morrison Planetarium, CalAcademy, GG Park
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Date: Monday, December 6, 2010
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Time: 7:30 PM
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Tickets: Adults: $12 / Seniors: $10 / Members: $6 -- buy online
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Parking: Music Concourse Garage (plus other important info)
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Transit: Muni 44 O-Shaughnessy bus line stops at the front door

Josh Frieman is a senior staff member (Scientist III) in the Theoretical Astrophysics group at  the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics. He is also Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, where he is a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.



Frieman earned a B.Sc. degree from Stanford (1981) and a PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago (1985). After a postdoc in the SLAC Theory Group, he joined the scientific staff at Fermilab in 1988. He served as Head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group from 1994 to 1999. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics. He has served on the Executive Committee of the APS Divison of Astrophysics, on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) of HEPAP, on the Astro 2010 Decadal Survey Committee, and on the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC).


Frieman's research centers on theoretical and observational cosmology, including studies of the nature of dark energy, the early Universe, gravitational lensing, the large-scale structure of the Universe, and supernovae as cosmological distance indicators. The author of over 230 publications, he led the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) Supernova Survey, which discovered over 500 type Ia supernovae for cosmology studies, and served as chair of the SDSS Collaboration Council. 


Frieman is a founder of and currently serves as Director of the Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of over 120 scientists from 20 institutions on 3 continents, which is building a 570-Megapixel camera to carry out a wide-field survey on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration. Frieman’s recent scientific papers can be found on the preprint ArXiv, http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Frieman_J/0/1/0/all/0/1


His index webpage at U. Chicago contains some additional content on graduate and undergraduate courses taught.