Avi Loeb

Abraham "Avi" Loeb (אברהם (אבי) לייב; born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (since 2016) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In July 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies, which is the Academies' forum for issues connected with the fields of physics and astronomy, including oversight of their decadal surveys. In June 2020, Loeb was sworn in as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House. 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 suggested that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, using the anomalous behavior of ʻOumuamua as an example. In 2023, he claimed to have recovered material from an interstellar meteor that could be evidence of an alien starship, claims which were criticized by some experts as hasty and sensational. Loeb was born in Beit Hanan, Israel in 1962. He took part in the national Talpiot program of the Israeli Defense Forces at the age of eighteen. While in Talpiot, he subsequently obtained a BSc degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1983, an MSc degree in Physics in 1985, and a PhD in Physics in 1986, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). From 1983 to 1988, he led the first international project supported by the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative.