Saul Perlmutter

From Berkeley News:

Perlmutter, 52, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), led the Supernova Cosmology Project that, in 1998, discovered that galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago...

...The accelerating expansion means that the universe could expand forever until, in the distant future, it is cold and dark. The teams’ discovery led to speculation that there is a “dark energy” that is pushing the universe apart. Though dark energy theoretically makes up 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe, astronomers and physicists have so far failed to discover the nature of this strange, repulsive force.

In recent years, Perlmutter has been working with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to build and launch the first space-based observatory designed specifically to understand the nature of dark energy. A dark-energy mission was named the top telescope-building priority in an August 2010 report from a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sanders, Robert. "Saul Perlnutter awarded 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics." Berkeley News, October 4, 2011.

Nobel Laureate, Physics Prize, 2011