When the Nobel Prize committee handed out the 2011 prizes on Dec. 11, Quest University's Dr. Robert Knop was there.

Knop, a physical science tutor at the Squamish university, attended the ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden as part of the team that won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae, Quest officials said in a statement issued on Wednesday (Dec. 28).

Half of the prize went to Berkeley, Calif. scientist Saul Perlmutter, with whom Knop worked closely in Berkeley during the final analysis that led to the discovery, Quest officials said. Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess shared the other half of the prize.

And though Knop's name isn't on the prize, he said Perlmutter and the others acknowledged his contribution, along with those of others who were part of the team that made the discovery.

“Watching Saul being given that Nobel Prize is one of those life events I wouldn't want to have missed,” Knop said in the statement. “It was perhaps unusual for a group this large to come out to the Nobel Prize ceremony. Brian, Adam and Saul may be the ones with the glory, they may be the ones that history will remember, but they did a good job of sharing some part of the glory with us, and made it clear that there are a lot of people who share the credit for this discovery.”

Knop, who has a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, was involved with Perlmutter in the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) from 1996 through 2005, and had multiple roles on the team. Primarily, he helped lead the task of maintaining and updating the software used for the data reduction pipeline during searches for the crucial kind of exploding star, called a Type Ia supernova, officials said.