Add another Berkeleyan to the growing list of people winning prizes for being awesome. This time it’s Geoff Marcy, astronomy professor and planet hunter extraordinaire. Yes, that’s right, he freaking hunts god damn planets for a living. Planets. How’s that for a line on the good ol’ resumé?

Professor Marcy won this year’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization this time. We say “this time” as some may remember when he shared the million dollar Shaw Prize in astronomy a couple years ago. This time around, however, the prize money is a tithe of what he got from the Shaw Prize.

Granted, $5000 isn’t a whole lot compared to some of the other prizes out there, but the award’s still pretty damn impressive. And everyone knows science isn’t about making money, anyway. It’s about finding aliens and destroying them before they get to us. We kid, of course (*WE’RE NOT KIDDING*).

Professor Marcy will receive the award on Nov. 7 on the Stanford campus as part of the two-day Wonderfest, part of which takes place on our very own campus. (As a side note, those who are interested in going when Wonderfest is on our campus should check out their site—more details later.)

And while the award comes from Carl Sagan’s amazing efforts at getting the public interested in science, we only wonder if Professor Marcy will follow Sagan in another field for which he is little-known: autotuned-up music.

Image Source: Work-Time-Fun—WTF under Creative Commons
A Glorious Dawn [Symphony of Science]
Astronomer Geoff Marcy, Earth’s Premier Planet Hunter, Wins Carl Sagan Prize [Wonderfest] via Reuters