Charley Lineweaver

Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver is an astrophysicist at the Australian National University’s Planetary Science Institute (PSI), a joint venture of the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Research School of Earth Science. His widely published research includes cosmology (determination of the age and composition of the universe), exoplanetology (the statistical analysis of exoplanets), astrobiology (using our new knowledge of cosmology to constrain life in the Universe) and cancer (origin of multicellularity and the atavistic model).

Dr Lineweaver has a Bachelor and Masters degree in Arts from prestigious USA universities, a Bachelor of Physics from Ludwig Maximillian’s University in Munich and a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatoire Astronomique in Strasbourg and, successively, a vice chancellor’s research fellow and Australian Research Council fellow at the University of New South Wales, where he taught one of the most popular general studies courses “Are We Alone?”.

Dr Lineweaver was also a member of the COBE satellite team, led by George Smoot (2006 Physics Nobel Prize), that discovered temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.