Nick Suntzeff's professor profile on Texas A&M's website doesn't list his research awards.

Among the accolades earned by the distinguished professor of physics and astronomy are Science magazine's "Scientific Breakthrough of the Year" in 1998 across all science disciplines, the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and his co-founding of a team whose research led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

It's by choice that he opts not to list these honors, so it comes as no surprise to those who know him that he'll likely leave his latest acknowledgement off: Earlier this month, he was among 50 other scientists to receive the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which recognizes major insights into the deepest questions of the universe. It comes with a $3 million prize to be shared by the recipients.

All of these distinctions -- each given over the past 14 years -- are tied to a 1998 discovery in which two teams of scientists simultaneously discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing as had been long assumed.

"It's the mysterious substance known as dark energy -- we learned it accounts for 73 percent of all the mass and energy in the universe," said Suntzeff, whose passion for teaching is apparent as he excitedly breaks down the science to a reporter, pointing out that roughly 4 percent of the universe is composed of regular matter -- stars, planets, people -- and the remaining 23 percent is dark matter. "We don't know what the driving force is behind the acceleration -- we only know the cause. It remains the biggest puzzle in physical science and perhaps even all of science."

Suntzeff, who has been at Texas A&M since 2006, co-founded, along with astronomer Brian P. Schmidt of Australian National University, one of the two discovery teams. Theirs was a 21-person group from five continents called the High-Z Supernova Search Team. They used distant exploding stars to trace the expansion of the universe billions of light years away.

The names of Suntzeff and his 18 other teammates aren't on the Nobel Prize; the rules for the 113-year-old honor restrict the number to three living persons. From the beginning, Suntzeff requested his group do what many in research do not: Recognize those who do the most work, even though the role of each was critical to the final result.

For their group, that meant then-post-grad students Schmidt and Adam Riess, with Johns Hopkins University/Space Telescope Science Institute. Saul Perlmutter, with the University of California at Berkley, led the second discovery team.

Later, Schmidt, who was 27 at the time with Suntzeff as his mentor, would emphasize that the efforts were not his alone, rather a part of the team.

"As the [High-Z] group's leader, I tend to get more than my fair share of the credit, but a project like this really represents the blood and sweat of many people," Schmidt wrote on a website devoted to explaining their research and lists the names of all involved.

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