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Robert Kirshner is the Clowes Professor of Science in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the Large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of Supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.

In 1981, along with, Augustus Oemler, Jr., Paul Schechter, and Stephen Shectman, Kirshner discovered the Boötes void in a survey of galactic redshifts. Kirshner was a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team that used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe. This universal acceleration implies the existence of dark energy and was named the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine. For this work he was jointly awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007.