Dr. Perlmutter received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. He currently runs the largest astrophysical transient discovery pipeline created to-date, the Palomar Transient Factory and was the PI on the early development of the Nyx code used to perform large adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamical + n-body simulations to calculate the absorption spectra caused by neutral hydrogen in the cosmological environment - a Lyman alpha forest cosmology simulator - for surveys such as BOSS and BigBOSS.

Dr. Nugent has presented his work as a participant on PBS News Hour, NASA's Space Science Update program, CNN, NOVA, NPR, and BBC. His work has also been featured in Time, Newsweek, Science and Nature.