Lars Bildsten (born 1964) is an American astrophysicist, best known for his work on the physics of

white dwarf A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes ...

s and their explosions as

Type Ia supernova A Type Ia supernova (read: "type one-A") is a type of supernova that occurs in binary systems (two stars orbiting one another) in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. The other star can be anything from a giant star to an even smaller white ...

e. He is the sixth director of the

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and rela ...

at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and a professor in the

UCSB Physics Department The Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara has 58 faculty members. It offers academic programs leading to the B.A., B.S., and Ph.D. degrees. Faculty Awards As of 2014, the department counts three Nobel Prize winners am ...

Biography

Bildsten's undergraduate degree is in engineering physics, from

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

. Bildsten was a

Hertz Foundation The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. The ...

fellow and received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

in 1991. He was then a research fellow at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

for three years, after which he accepted a faculty appointment at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Rising from assistant to associate professor, in both the physics and astronomy departments, he moved to UCSB in 1999.Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
"Lars Bildsten Biographical Sketch"
/ref> In 2010, he was awarded the Wayne Rosing, Simon and Diana Raab chair in theoretical astrophysics. He was named director of the Kavli Institute, succeeding

David Gross David Jonathan Gross (; born February 19, 1941) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. ...

, in 2012. In addition to his university teaching and research, Bildsten has devoted significant effort to strengthening science and engineering education in grades 7-12. A member of the board of directors of Santa Barbara's Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Foundation, he worked to raise $3 million in funding for a dedicated facility and to support math tutors.

Honors

Bildsten received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1995. In 1998, the Research Corporation designated him as a Cottrell Scholar. He was awarded the

Helen B. Warner Prize The Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society to a young astronomer (aged less than 36, or within 8 years of the award of their PhD) for a significant contribution to observational or theoretical ...

of the American Astronomical Society in 1999 and the 2017 Dannie Heineman Prize. His invited lectureships include the 2000

Edwin Salpeter Edwin Ernest Salpeter (3 December 1924 – 26 November 2008,) was an Austrian–Australian–American astrophysicist. Life Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Salpeter emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens to escape the Nazis. He ...

Lecture at Cornell, and the 2004 Biermann Lecture at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 and Elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bildsten, Lars 1964 births Living people 21st-century American physicists American astronomers Cornell University alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Astronomical Society Winners of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics California Institute of Technology fellows Ohio State University College of Engineering alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society