Andy Howell

Senior Scientist / UCSB Adjunct Faculty

Biography

Andy Howell manages a research group at Las Cumbres Observatory, where he is a staff scientist. He also has graduate students and postdocs affiliated with UCSB, where he teaches. He got his PhD from the University of Texas and did postdoctoral work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Saul Perlmutter, and at the University of Toronto with Ray Carlberg. He also appears on television shows on National Geographic, the Science Channel, Discovery+, PBS, the BBC, and the History Channel. He is cohost of the show Science Vs. Cinema on YouTube. He has also been the science advisor for books, comic books, and movies.

Research

Andy Howell is the PI of the Global Supernova Project, a worldwide collaboration of more than 200 scientists studying supernovae, and the co-PI of the Global Kilonova Project, searching for the explosive counterparts of gravitational wave events. In 2017 his group co-discovered and helped to characterize the first kilonova. He has helped to discover and explain many types of new supernovae, use them to gain insight into stellar evolution, and has used them for cosmology. His group also studies Tidal Disruption Events and helps to builds infrastructure for rapid astronomical communication and data management. He previously worked in the Supernova Cosmology Project and the Supernova Legacy Survey, which produced the best constraints on the properties of Dark Energy. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in his field according to Clarivate Analytics.