Cosmobiology

A smorgasbord of cosmology, astrobiology, exoplanets and the astronomical prerequisites for life

Dr Charley Lineweaver

An astrophysicist, Charles H. Lineweaver is an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Planetary Science Institute (PSI). His research areas include 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). His research has been published in numerous science journals and magazines.

Educated at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich where he was awarded highest honors in physics, Dr. Lineweaver earned a BA in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton, an MA in English from Brown University, a BS in physics from Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, and a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994.

He was a member of the COBE satellite team, led by George Smoot (2006 Physics Nobel Prize), that discovered the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatoire Astronomique in Strasbourg and, successively, a vice chancellors postdoctoral research fellow and Australian Research Council (ARC) fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) where he taught one of the most popular general studies courses “Are We Alone?”

A member of the editorial board of Astrobiology Magazine, he is the author of more than seventy papers published in scientific journals or in volumes of collected works.