NICHOLAS B. SUNTZEFF
January 2024
Boris Nicholaevich Suntzeff Evdokimoff was born in 1952 and is a native of San Francisco and Corte Madera, California. Fortunately, his parents changed his name to Nicholas Boris Suntzeff; otherwise, he would have had the crap beat out of him in grade school with a first name like Boris in the time of the Cold War. The first name Nicholas was bad enough.
His paternal grandfather owned the largest private company for armaments in Russia at the time of the 1917 Revolution. Most of his family emigrated from the cities of Izhevsk and Perm in Tsarist Russia in 1918 with the White Army of Admiral Kolchak and the Czech Army. The family lived in Harbin, China, until about 1926, when they came to the U.S. and San Francisco. One great uncle, Boris, stayed behind as a Bolshevik and was in the inner circle of Lenin’s supporters but later escaped when Stalin took power. Family history tells that he was the lover of Nadya Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin. Nicholas’s grandmother Zoya, a fervent anti communist, co-owned a garment factory in S.F., whose other owner turned out to be the primary recruiter for the Soviets trying to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from the Berkeley Rad Labs in the 50s. This is a small part of the story of the recent movie “Oppenheimer.”
Most of the family died in transit from the Ural Mountains to Chita on the border with Mongolia. Nicholas’s father took the last name of his mother upon immigration. The Suntzeffs were prosperous merchants in Perm and are members of the ancient Udmurt culture, the Siberian people whose descendants are now the Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians.
Nicholas went to grade school and high school in Marin County. In grade school, his significant achievement, outside of coping with the first name “Nicholas,” was an honorable mention for finishing his science fair project on time in fifth grade. In high school, he was a good friend of the actor Robin Williams, who played on the varsity soccer team with Nick.
He received a scholarship to attend Stanford University and received a B.S. with
distinction in mathematics in 1974 and Phi Beta Kappa. At Stanford, he and another student Michael Kast built the Stanford Student Observatory, which is still in operation near the Dish. Sally Ride used to cream Nick in tennis mercilessly. Not cut out to be a tennis star, he then went to Lick Observatory and U.C. Santa Cruz, where he received a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics in 1980 under Professor Robert Kraft. In 1983, he received the international Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis of the year. After grad school, he was a postdoc at the University of Washington and then won a Carnegie Fellowship to work at Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories from 1982-to 6.
During the summers, he worked as a seasonal park ranger for the California State Beaches. He inadvertently appeared in a Budweiser commercial and started a nude beach that still exists today.
In 1986, he moved to La Serena, Chile, and became a staff astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory and left in 2006 as the Associate Director of Science for NOAO. He studied supernovae and stellar populations and built astronomical instruments during that time. In 1994 a group he helped create in 1989 – the Calán/Tololo supernova survey – discovered the most accurate way to measure distances in the far Universe, using exploding stars “supernovae.” This discovery led to the most precise method to measure the expansion of the Universe, the Hubble-Lemaître Constant. In 1998, the group – the High-Z Supernova Team – which he co founded with Brian Schmidt in 1994, announced the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, consistent with a prediction of Einstein in 1917 that there is a fundamental tension in the vacuum that acts as anti-gravity, called a cosmological constant or dark energy. This energy comprises 70% of the whole Universe. As he was quoted in 2011, “Only once in the history of mankind do you get to discover ¾’s of the Universe” This discovery has won many awards, including the Breakthrough of the Year 1998 from Science Magazine, the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2015. In addition, Suntzeff won the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy Science Award in 1992 and 1998 for his supernova work. The story of the discovery of dark energy is given in
the book by Richard Panek “The 4% Universe.”
In 2002, he saved the actor Alan Alda’s life, which you can read about in Alda’s book, “Never Have Your Dog Stuffed.” He and Alan also were unintentionally part of a prison breakout where several people were shot. Still, again, you need to read the book. He was also a good friend of Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom he helped with his Ph.D. thesis when Neil was at CTIO observing the Galactic Center for his thesis.
Suntzeff came to A&M in 2006 as the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Professor of Observational Astronomy to build a significant Astronomy Program at TAMU. As of 2023, A&M now has eleven astronomy faculty. Suntzeff was elected a University Distinguished Professor in 2013 and has won the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Association of Former Students of Texas A&M and the George H.W. Bush Excellence Award in International Research. He recently became a Regents Professor of the Texas A&M University System.
In 2010, he was awarded a Jefferson Fellowship by the National Academies to work at the U.S. State Department. He was a Humanitarian Affairs Officer in the Office of Human Rights, where he oversaw the science issues involved with U.S. foreign policy in human rights. He represented the U.S. State Department before the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction and the White House Subcommittee on Disaster Risk Reduction. The State Department encouraged Suntzeff to give public talks on his research when visiting other countries. However, the State Department lawyers required that he use quotes when referring to “Dark Energy.” Go figure.
In 2011, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Laureates were Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess of the High-Z Supernova Team and Saul Perlmutter of the Supernova Cosmology Project. Of the Prize, Lord Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, praised the prizewinners but criticized the Nobel Committee's rules that a maximum of three people could share in an award: "It would have been fairer, and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two group.”
A journalist friend asked Suntzeff about his reaction, as co-founder of the HZT, to the Nobel announcement and not being a Laureate. He responded, "Yeah I am disappointed, but also disappointed that I am disappointed."
Nicholas is married to Jeruška Vladislavić Brtetivić (he can’t pronounce it either, especially the “Brt” part), a native of the island Brać in Dalmatia, Croatia. Her father was a partisan that fought with Tito during WWII. The Vladislavić family farm is one of the few remaining vineyards with the original Zinfandel grapes brought to California in the 1800s. Jeruška and Nick have been married since 1987. This Croatian and American met in a Chinese restaurant in Coquimbo, Chile, on a blind date. They have one daughter Larisa Thais McMahon, who graduated from the Allen Academy of Bryan, and lately Northwestern University and is the apple of her father's eye.
