Željko Ivezić

Željko Ivezić, corresponding member of HAZU, was born in 1965 in Sarajevo. At the University of Zagreb, he graduated in 1990 in mechanical engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Shipbuilding, and in 1991 in physics at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics, both studies summa cum laude. He obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1995. In 1997, he went to Princeton University where he worked at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Since 2008, he has been a full professor at Washington University in Seattle.
According to the NASA Astrophysics Data System bibliographic database, at the end of 2020, his publications were cited over 91,000 times in total, with an H-index of 134. He is the main author of the textbook “Statistics, Data Mining and Machine Learning in Astronomy”. Ivezić’s research in astronomy and astrophysics covers a wide area and includes studies of asteroids in our solar system, stars, the structure of our Milky Way galaxy, as well as the properties of galaxies and quasars. Their common thread is the application of statistical “data mining” and “machine learning” methods on modern huge astronomical databases. Some of his most notable contributions are the discoveries of the substructure of the Milky Way, the bimodality of the colors of galaxies, the strong correlations between the dynamical features of asteroids and their surface chemical properties, as well as the development of photometric methods for estimating the distance and chemical composition of stars, and the development of models for the interpretation of emission in the infrared. spectra and optical variability of quasars. Currently, Ivezić’s interests are focused on the construction of the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile and the launch of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project. He is the chief director for the construction of the Rubin Observatory, and the scientific director for LSST.