Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb is an American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He serves as Chair of the Harvard Astronomy department (since 2011), Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot project – which aims to launch lightweight spacecraft towards the nearest stars using a powerful laser (since 2016), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative – the first interdisciplinary center worldwide dedicated to the study of black holes (since 2016), and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Loeb is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. As of July 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies, which is the Academies' principal forum for issues connected with the fields of Physics and Astronomy including oversight of their decadal surveys. In December 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space. In 2015, Loeb was appointed as the Science Theory Director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2018, he attracted media attention for suggesting that alien space craft may be in our solar system, using the anomalous behavior of 'Oumuamua as an example. In 2019, Loeb reported together with his Harvard undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, the first discovery of a meteor that originated outside the Solar System.