Rate My Professor Brian Schmidt

Professor Brian Schmidt is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy from the University of Arizona (1989), a Master of Arts in Astronomy from Harvard University (1992), and a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University (1993). Schmidt joined the staff of the Australian National University in 1995 following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research focuses on supernovae, cosmology, gamma-ray bursts, survey astronomy, and photometry. He led the High-Z Supernova Search Team, whose work contributed to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Schmidt served as the 12th Vice-Chancellor and President of the Australian National University from 2016 to 2024. He is currently leading the SkyMapper telescope project and the associated Southern Sky Survey.

Schmidt received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, jointly with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Additional honors include the Shaw Prize in Astronomy (2006), the Gruber Prize for Cosmology (2007), election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (2012), appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia (2013), and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015). He previously held a Federation Fellowship and a Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Schmidt continues active research in astronomy at ANU, including work on exploding stars and large-scale sky surveys.