Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Education Saul Perlmutter was born one of three children in the Ashkenazi Jewish family of Daniel D. Perlmutter, professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at University of Pennsylvania, and Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson), professor emerita of Temple University’s School of Social Administration. His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated to Canada (and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York) from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti in 1919. Perlmutter spent his childhood in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. He went to school in nearby Germantown; first Greene Street Friends School for the elementary grades, followed by Germantown Friends School for grades 7 through 12. He graduated with an AB in physics from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis titled "An Astrometric Search for a Stellar Companion to the Sun" described the development and use of an automated telescope to search for Nemesis candidates under Richard A. Muller. At the same time, he was using this telescope to search for Nemesis and supernovae, which would lead him to his award-winning work in cosmology. Perlmutter attributes the idea for an automated supernova search to Luis Alvarez, a 1968 Nobel laureate, who shared his idea with Perlmutter's research adviser. Work Perlmutter heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was this team along with the competing High-z Supernova Search Team led by Riess and Schmidt, which found evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe based on observing Type Ia supernova in the distant universe.