 He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1996; it resulted in measurements of over twenty new type Ia supernovae and a method to utilize Type Ia supernovae as accurate distance indicators by correcting for intervening dust and intrinsic inhomogeneities.Riess' PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and William H. Press and won the Robert J. Trumpler Award in 1999 for PhD theses of unusual importance to astronomy.Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving on to the Space Telescope Science Institute in 1999.