Secret Science Club North: Astrophysicist David Spergel

Before & After

Astrophysicist David Spergel won the 2018 Breakthrough Prize for his work mapping the infant Universe. Observations of ancient light in the “Cosmic Microwave Background” produced the mind-boggling fact that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old and revealed that ordinary matter makes up a mere 5 percent of the cosmos. Now, David Spergel is looking to answer the next big questions: What happened in the moments just after the Big Bang? What is dark energy, the unseen force that seems to drive the expansion of the Universe?

Director of the Center for Computational Physics at the Flatiron Institute and professor of astronomy at Princeton University, David Spergel is currently co-chair of the science team for WFIRST, NASA’s next major outer-space telescope mission. In addition to the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Dr. Spergel received the MacArthur (“Genius”) Award, NASA’s exceptional service medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy. He and his work have been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, Wired,and beyond.