Brian Schmidt

Happy Birthday to Nobel Prize Winner Brian Paul Schmidt. Born in Missoula, Montana, the family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska when he was 13. Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist “since I was about five-years-old [but] ... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn’t enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant.” His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as “a minor pastime”, was made just before he enrolled at Arizona University. Even then, he was not fully committed: he said “I’ll do astronomy and change into something else later,” and just never made that change. He received his MA (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. Schmidt’s PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant. While at Harvard, he met his future wife, the Australian (Jenny) Jennifer M. Gordon who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994, they moved to Australia. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You can read our story on it here https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.4.0609 Schmidt is currently leading the SkyMapper telescope Project and the associated Southern Sky Survey, which will encompass billions of individual objects, enabling the team to pick out the most unusual objects. In 2014 they announced the discovery of the first star which did not contain any iron, suggesting it is one of the first stars formed during the first rush of star formation following the Big Bang. As of last month, Schmidt is the Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University (ANU).

Date in History: 24 February 1967