Anthony Aguirre

Santa Cruz, CA

Grantmaker

Bio

Updated 03/22/26

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and physicist who holds the Faggin Presidential Chair for the Physics of Information at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has been a faculty member since 2003. He earned his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2000 and was subsequently a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining UCSC. His research spans cosmological inflation, eternal inflation, early universe physics, quantum mechanics foundations, and the physics of information. He is a co-founder and President and CEO of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), an organization focused on steering transformative technologies—especially AI—toward beneficial outcomes and away from existential risks, which he co-founded in 2014 with Max Tegmark and Jaan Tallinn. He also co-founded the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which supports research on foundational questions in physics and cosmology, and co-founded the prediction aggregation platform Metaculus in 2015. He is the author of the popular science book Cosmological Koans (W.W. Norton, 2019).