NASA/Joel Kowsky · Public domain

David Spergel helped turn a satellite mission into one of cosmology's defining measurements: as a lead scientist on NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, he helped pin down the age, composition and shape of the universe with unprecedented precision. A theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton for decades, he became president of the Simons Foundation in 2021, and in 2022 was asked to chair NASA's independent study of unidentified anomalous phenomena.