Abraham (Avi) Loeb
Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr Professor of Science at Harvard University and a New York Times bestselling author. He received a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at age 24 (1980-1986), was subsequently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1993) and has been a professor at Harvard University since 1993. Avi chaired the Harvard Astronomy department between 2011-2020 and has served as director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Computation since 2005. Loeb is founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, chairs the Advisory Board for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, and chaired the Board on Physics & Astronomy of the National Academies in 2018-2021. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Science, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Loeb also served as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington DC. In 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space along with Elon Musk. Loeb wrote over a thousand scientific papers and nine books, including “Extraterrestrial”, “Life in the Cosmos” and “Interstellar”. Together with Frank Laukien he co-founded the Galileo Project and Copernicus Space Corporation, hoping to advance the next Copernican revolution by launching numerous miniaturized probes, equipped with AI into our solar system, and then interstellar space.
