Alexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University.  He is also Professor in the Department of Computer Science.  Alex is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation.

He was born and educated in Hungary and is now a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written over 450 papers in various scientific journals, covering areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics and computer science. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Award in Physical Sciences, in 2008 a Microsoft Award for Technical Computing.