Abraham (Avi) Loeb is an American/Israeli theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves as Chair of the Astronomy department at Harvard University and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His book "How Did The First Stars and Galaxies Form?" (Princeton University Press, 2010) won the 2012 Chambliss Award for Scientific Writing by the American Astronomical Society.Loeb was born in Israel in 1962 and took part in the national Talpiot program before receiving a graduate degree in Plasma Physics at age 24 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Between 1988-1993, Loeb was long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he started to work in theoretical astrophysics. In 1993 he moved to Harvard University as an assistant professor in the department of astronomy, where he was tenured three years later. Loeb was given a large number of awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the Gallileo Chair (Cattedra Galileiana) in Pisa, Italy . Loeb has worked on a broad range of research areas in astrophysics and cosmology, including the first stars, the epoch of reionization, the formation and evolution of massive black holes, gravitational lensing by planets, gamma-ray bursts at high redshifts, 21cm cosmology, and imaging black hole silhouettes. Some of his papers are considered as pioneering in areas that have become by now the focus of established communities of astrophysicists. In particular, Loeb was among the first theorists to trigger the current research on the first stars and quasars, and the earliest gamma-ray bursts. In a series of papers with his students and postdocs, he addressed how and when the first stars and black holes formed and what effects they had on the young universe.In 2006 Loeb was featured in a cover story of TIME magazine on the first stars and in a Scientific American article on the Dark Ages of the Universe. In 2008 Loeb was featured in a cover story of Smithsonian magazine on black holes and in two cover stories of Astronomy Magazine, one on the collision between the Milky-Way and Andromeda and the second on the future state of our Universe. In 2009, Loeb reviewed in a Scientific American article a new technique for imaging black hole silhouettes.