Alexander van der Horst

Alexander van der Horst is a Professor and Chair of the Physics Department at the George Washington University, where he has been a faculty member since 2015. After growing up in Laren, and attending the Gemeentelijk Gymnasium in Hilversum, he got two Masters degrees and his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, where he was also a postdoctoral researcher; and he was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow in Huntsville, Alabama. His research focuses on observing the biggest explosions in the Universe with telescopes all across the globe and in space and modeling them with state-of-the-art computational techniques. His work has resulted in 250 peer-reviewed publications, including more than 20 in Nature or Science, and more than 250 non-refereed publications; and those publications have resulted in more than 25,000 citations. He has supervised more than 10 graduate and 25 undergraduate students, and his research and teaching have received international and institutional awards. He is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in physics and astronomy, and he enjoys doing outreach to the general public and future generations of scientists.

He has been actively involved in NAF activities since 2019, starting in the Washington DC Chapter, where he is now a core member of the local board. Since 2021 he has been a member of the NAF Education Committee, and recently he has helped with some activities of the Internship Committee. He is connected in different ways to various Dutch organizations in DC, including the Netherlands Embassy and DC Dutch; and he looks forward to further deepening his engagement in the NAF.