Brian P. Schmidt

Brian P. Schmidt (born 1967) is an astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and is widely known for his research in using supernovae as Cosmological Probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship.

Education

Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1989 and received his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.

Work

Schmidt was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1993-94) before moving on to Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1995.

Schmidt lead the High-Z SN Search program which traced the Universe's expansion back nearly 8 billion light years. In 1998 this team, along with the Supernova Cosmology Project, found evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe, an achievement that was named Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year.

Schmidt is currently leading the SkyMapper telescope Project and the associated Southern Sky Survey.

Awards

Schmidt has received the Australian Government's Malcolm McIntosh Prize in 2000, Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2000, the Australian Academy of Science's Pawsey Medal Medal in 2001, and the Vainu Bappu Medal of the Astronomical Society of India in 2002. He was the Marc Aaronson Memorial Lecturer in 2005, and in 2006, he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.

Schmidt and the other members of the High-Z Team (the set defined by the co-authors of Riess et al. 1998) shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Supernova Cosmology Project (the set defined by the co-authors of Perlmutter et al. 1999) for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

See also

* Cosmological constant
* Dark energy

External links

* [http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~brian Brian Schmidt's Home Page]