Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt is an American born Australian astrophysicist who led the High-Z Supernova Search Team, whose observations of distant supernovae showed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down, a discovery that revealed the existence of what is now called dark energy. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae. Schmidt earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1993, joined Mount Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University in 1995, and later served as Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University from 2016 to 2023. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 and also shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Perlmutter and Riess.