Alexei Starobinsky

Born on 19 April 1948 in Moscow, Alexei Starobinsky is one of the pioneers of inflationary cosmology. Starobinsky studied at Moscow State University and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. Upon earning his PhD in 1975, he accepted a position as a research scientist at the Landau Institute, where he has remained his entire career. From 1999 to 2003, he served as the institute’s deputy director. He has also served several stints as a visiting scientist both in France, at the École Normale Supérieure and the Institut Henri Poincaré, and in Japan, at Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo. In the 1970s Starobinsky studied particle creation in the early universe and from rotating black holes. That research led to his proposing in 1979, independently of Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, a theory of cosmic inflation. He further calculated the generation of gravitational waves during the exponential expansion at the dawn of the universe. For his work, Starobinsky has received many honors and awards, including the 1996 Friedmann Prize, the 2009 Tomalla Prize, the 2010 Oskar Klein Medal, the 2013 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the 2014 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, and the 2018 Vasily Struve Medal. He has served as a coeditor of JETP Letters, the International Journal of Modern Physics D, Classical and Quantum Gravity, and General Relativity and Gravitation. And he is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. (Photo credit: Gruber Foundation)

Date in History: 19 April 1948