Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is an American astrophysicist who is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and is head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Saul Perlmutter was born to Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson), now professor emerita of the Temple University School of Social Administration, and Daniel D. Perlmutter, now professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti to Canada in 1919 and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York. Perlmutter spent his childhood in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. He went to Quaker schools in nearby Germantown; first Greene Street Friends School for the elementary grades, followed by Germantown Friends School for grades seven through twelve. He graduated with an AB in physics from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1986.