Alexander Szalay

Alexander Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Big Data with joint appointments in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. A leader in Space Science, he specializes in theoretical astrophysics, cosmology, and data-intensive computing. He earned a B.Sc. in Physics from Kossuth University in Hungary in 1969, an M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from Eötvös Loránd University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Eötvös Loránd University in 1975. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley (1980-1981) and the University of Chicago (1981-1982), Szalay joined Johns Hopkins University in 1989 as Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He advanced to Alumni Centennial Professor in 1998, added a professorship in Computer Science in 2001, and was named Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2015. As Founding Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), he leads efforts in petascale data management across disciplines.

Szalay's research encompasses statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies, galaxy formation, structure formation in dark matter-dominated universes, and the development of scientific databases and AI applications in science. He architected the Science Archive and SkyServer for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), enabling public access to vast astronomical datasets and influencing data-intensive paradigms in astronomy, genomics, and radiation oncology. With over 500 publications cited more than 129,000 times on Google Scholar, key works include 'The statistics of peaks of Gaussian random fields' (Astrophysical Journal, 1986), 'The SDSS SkyServer: Public Access to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data' (2001), 'The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary' (2000), and 'Cosmological parameters from SDSS' (various years). His impact is evident in pioneering data federation via the National Virtual Observatory and high-performance computing innovations. Szalay has received prestigious awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2004), Microsoft Jim Gray eScience Award (2007), IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award (2015), Viktor Ambartsumian International Science Prize (2020), and ACM SIGMOD Systems Award (2021, team). He is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the ACM, and has served on national committees for NRC, NASA, NSF, and DOE.