Forgot your password?
Document Actions
Visit by Alex Szalay
Alex Szalay
Alexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He was born and educated in Hungary. After graduation he spent postdoctoral periods at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, before accepting a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. He is the architect for the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
He has been collaborating with Jim Gray of Microsoft to design an efficient system to perform data mining on the SDSS Terabyte sized archive, based on innovative spatial indexing techniques.
He is leading a grass-roots standardization effort to bring the next generation Terabyte-sized databases in astronomy to a common basis, so that they will be interoperable – the Virtual Observatory. He is Project Director of the NSF-funded National Virtual Observatory. He is involved in creating testbed applications for the Computational Grid. He has written over 340 papers in various scientific journals, covering areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics and computer science.
In 1990 he has been elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a Corresponding Member. In 2003 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received one of the Alexander Von Humboldt Prizes in Physical Sciences.