Alexei Starobinsky, Professor in Faculty of Physics, Elected Foreign Associate at U.S. National Academy of Sciences
Alexei Starobinsky, Professor in the HSE Faculty of Physics, has been elected Foreign Associate at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Previously, he has served as an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences of Germany (Leopoldina), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and two Indian academies – the Indian National Science Academy (New Delhi) and the National Academy of Sciences (Allahabad).
Professor Starobinsky’s research interests include classical and quantum theories of gravity, cosmology, and relativistic astrophysics. He authored the first books on the inflation theory (1979, 1980), which is the leading cosmology theory today and describes the early universe before the Hot Big Bang stage. Together with Andrei Linde and Alan Guth, he is considered a founder of this theory; for their achievement, in 2014, they were jointly awarded the Kavli Prize, a leading international award in astrophysics. He is also the recipient of one of the most prestigious awards in cosmology, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2013), as well as several other medals and awards, including the Andrei Sakharov golden medal awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences (2016).
Professor Starobinsky’s scholarly achievements also include the calculation of the number of created particles and the average tensor in momentum energy of quantum fields in homogeneous anisotropic cosmological models (1971, co-authored with Y.B. Zeldovich). He developed the hypothesis suggested by Zeldovich in 1971 and proved that rotating black holes must generate and radiate particles (1973), which was a precursor of Stephen Hawking’s theory that all black holes, not only rotating ones, radiate particles (1974). Together with Y.N, Pariiski et al, Professor Starobinsky also discovered angular fluctuations of the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation using a RATAN-600 radio telescope (1992).
Alexei Starobinsky is Chief Research Fellow at the RAS Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics and a member of the editorial board at ten leading academic journals in the areas of his research interests.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is the most authoritative public academic organization in the United States. It was founded in 1863 by the U.S. Congress, and its founding act was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. The academy aims to serve as an expert community that helps the country and the public in the most complicated issues related to science. Academy members work on a pro bono basis.
Today, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences counts about 2,350 members and over 450 foreign associates. Approximately 200 Nobel Prize laureates serve as members. New members are elected for life by current members in a ballot vote. Being elected as a foreign associate of the Academy is one of the most significant acknowledgements of a person’s input on global science.
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