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.