Alex Szalay

Alex Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy and computer science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting School of Engineering.

Szalay is an international leader in astronomy, cosmology, the science of big data, and data‐intensive computing.

In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Alexander Sándor Szalay, Jr. was born in Hungary.

His father is Sándor Szalay, who is considered “the father of nuclear physics in Hungary” for his discovery of a natural enrichment mechanism of uranium and neutrinos.

A minor planet discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point Observatory was named 170010 Szalay in his honor.

Szalay is a leader in the grass-roots standardization effort to bring the next generation petascale databases in astronomy to a common basis, so that they will be interoperable.

In support of this goal, Szalay was Project Director of the National Virtual Observatory.

Szalay graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1969 from Kossuth University, now University of Debrecen, in Hungary.

He then received a Master of Science in Theoretical Physics 1972 and a Ph.D in Astrophysics in 1975 from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

During this period, from 1974 to 1982, Szalay also played guitar in the Hungarian rock band Panta Rhei (band).

After graduation Szalay spent postdoctoral periods at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Fermilab, before accepting an assistant professorship at Eötvös Loránd University in 1982.

After rising to the rank of full professor at Eötvös, he joined Johns Hopkins University in 1989.

In 1990, Szalay was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a Corresponding Member and awarded the E.W. Fullam Prize of the Dudley Observatory.

Subsequently, he was named the Alumni Centennial Chair in 1998 and earned a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science in 2001.

In 2001, Jim Gray and Szalay wrote up a viewpoint article on the national virtual observatory project for Science, entitled "The World-Wide Telescope."

He was also one of the founders of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance and part of the core team to build the Galaxy Zoo, one of the most visible citizen science projects today.

Szalay collaborated with Simon White and Gerard Lemson to build a database similar to the SkyServer out of the Millennium Simulation, which became the reference cosmology simulation used by astronomers all over the world.

In collaboration with Piero Madau, he is building the 1.2PB database, known as The Milky Way Laboratory, for the Silver River cosmology simulation, currently running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Szalay was involved in the early projects related to the Computational Grid, in particular the GriPhyN and iVDGL projects, creating testbed applications for high energy physics and astrophysics.

The following year, he received Hungary's Széchenyi Prize, which recognizes “those who have made an outstanding contribution to academic life in Hungary.” Szalay was recognized in particular for his “discovery of the large scale (400 million light years) distribution pattern of galaxies.” In 2003, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2004, he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Research Award in Physical Sciences.

He has collaborated on high-speed data analytics for more than a decade, and has been part of the TeraFlow project since 2004 and the Open Science Grid.

He was also heavily involved in the Data Conservancy, researching the long-term curation and preservation of scientific data.

In 2007, Szalay received the Jim Gray eScience Award in recognition for his “foundational contributions to interdisciplinary advances in the field of astronomy and groundbreaking work with Jim Gray.” The IEEE Computer Society awarded Szalay with the 2015 Sidney Fernbach Award for "his outstanding contributions to the development of data-intensive computing systems and on the application of such systems in many scientific areas including astrophysics, turbulence, and genomics.”

Szalay is an astrophysicist who has made significant contribution to our understanding of the structure formation and on the nature of the dark matter in the universe.

Distinguished in the area of the cosmology, he works on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation.

He has contributed much to the field of theoretical astrophysics and large scale structure.

Szalay has developed several novel statistical techniques about optimal estimators for galaxy correlations, power spectra, photometric redshifts for galaxies, optimal co-adding of multicolor images, PCA-based spectral classification of galaxies and Bayesian techniques applied to spatial cross-matching of different astronomical catalogs.

He has also led the development of data-intensive computer architectures covering all aspects of this process from design to implementation.

Particular accomplishments include:

Professor Szalay is the Architect for the Science Archive and Chair of the Science Council of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most used astronomy facility in the world today.

He collaborated with Jim Gray to design an efficient system to perform data mining on the SDSS Terabyte sized archive, based on innovative spatial indexing techniques, that represented a “thousand-fold increase in the total amount of data that astronomers have collected to date.” The SDSS Science Archive has attracted an unprecedented number of users, and is considered to be an example for online archives of the future.

Currently, he is on the Science Advisory Council of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

In 2008, he became Doctor Honoris Causa of the Eötvös Loránd University.

Since 2009, Szalay has been the founding director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) at Johns Hopkins, an interdisciplinary institute fostering “education and research in applying data-intensive technologies to problems of national interest in physical and biological sciences and engineering.” At the time of its founding, IDIES was the “first interdisciplinary big data center of its type […] and has since inspired similar efforts at other universities.” IDIES is supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Nvidia, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation.

The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program was established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.

Szalay holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science.

Through the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship, Szalay also will be teaching a new undergraduate class in data science, using a synthesis of statistics, computer science, and basic sciences that he thinks “will become the fundamental language used by the next generation of scientists.”

In March 2015, Szalay was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching.