Inauguration to the Wayne Rosing, Simon and Diana Raab Chair in Theoretical Astrophysics: Exploding Stars

Lars Bildsten is a Permanent Member at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Professor in the Department of Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cornell University in 1991, where he held a Fannie and John Hertz Fellowship. Dr. Bildsten was at Caltech for three years as the Lee A. DuBridge Fellow and received a Compton Fellowship from NASA in Spring 1994. He was an assistant and associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy Departments at UC Berkeley from January 1995 to July 1999. Among his awards are the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Cottrell Scholarship of the Research Corporation, and the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society. Dr. Bildsten was the Salpeter Lecturer at Cornell University and the Biermann Lecturer at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He has served on many international scientific advisory boards, including the "Decadal Survey" prioritization process for Federal investments in astrophysics for 2010-2020. His efforts in outreach have been focused on the expansion of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy.