Riess was born in Washington, D.C., one of three children. He grew up in Warren, New Jersey, where his father owned a frozen-foods distribution company, Bistro International, and his mother worked as a clinical psychologist. Michael Riess immigrated to the United States with his parents from Germany on the ship SS Europa in 1936. Adam Riess has two sisters— Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist, and Holly Hagerman, an artist. Riess married Nancy Joy Schondorf in 1998. He is Jewish.
Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving on to the Space Telescope Science Institute in 1999. He took up his current position at Johns Hopkins University in 2006. He also sits on the selection committee for the Astronomy award, given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize. In July 2016, Riess was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg. Riess jointly led the study with Brian Schmidt in 1998 for the High-z Supernova Search Team which first reported evidence that the Universe's expansion rate is now accelerating through monitoring of Type Ia Supernovae. The team's observations were contrary to the current theory that the expansion of the universe was slowing down; instead, by monitoring the color shifts in the light from supernovas from Earth, they discovered that these billion-year old novae were still accelerating. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory, and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe, such as the existence of dark energy. The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science Magazine in 1998, and Riess was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Schmidt and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work. In the book The 4 Percent Universe, scientific journalist Richard Panek claims that Riess made improper use of the supernova data collected by the Calán/Tololo Survey, publishing them prior to the authors and without their permission. However, coincident publication dates and acknowledgements in one of these publications contradict this claim.
Awards and honors
Riess received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Robert J. Trumpler Award in 1999 and Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2001. He won the American Astronomical Society's Helen B. Warner Prize in 2003 and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in 2004 for the discovery of cosmic acceleration. In 2006, he shared the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for contributions to the discovery of the acceleration of the universe. Schmidt and all the members of the High-Z Team shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with the Supernova Cosmology Project for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Riess was the winner of MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2008. He was also elected in 2009 to the National Academy of Sciences. Along with Perlmutter and Schmidt, he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Riess, along with Brian P. Schmidt, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team shared in the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. In 2012, Riess received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2020, Riess was made fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Media appearances
Riess participated on the NPR radio quiz program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! in 2011.
