Abraham “Avi” Loeb (Hebrew: אברהם (אבי) לייב; born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (since 2016) and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In July 2018 he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)[7] of the National Academies, which is the Academies’ forum for issues connected with the fields of Physics and Astronomy including oversight of their decadal surveys.