Biosketch

Péter Mészáros is a theoretical astrophysicist best known for his work in cosmology, gamma-ray bursts and neutrino astrophysics. He was born in Hungary and raised in Belgium and Argentina, receiving an M.S. in Physics from the National University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Cambridge Universities, and a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He joined the faculty of Pennsylvania State University in 1983, where he is the Eberly Chair Professor Emeritus of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, and Director Emeritus of the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics. He served as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1993-2003, and as theory lead of the NASA Swift satellite consortium. He has held visiting appointments at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (U.C. Santa Barbara), Cambridge University, California Institute of Technology, Fermi National Laboratory, and was Einstein Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Membership Type

Member

Election Year

2021

Primary Section

Section 12: Astronomy

Secondary Section

Section 13: Physics