Brian Schmidt | |
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12th Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University | |
In office 1 January 2016 –31 December 2023 | |
Chancellor | Gareth Evans Julie Bishop |
Preceded by | Ian Young |
Succeeded by | Genevieve Bell |
Personal details | |
Born | Brian Schmidt 24 February 1967 Missoula,Montana, United States |
Citizenship | |
Nationality | American Australian [1] |
Alma mater | University of Arizona (1989), Harvard University (1993) |
Spouse | Jennifer M. Gordon |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Astrophysics |
Institutions | Australian National University |
Thesis | Type II supernovae, expanding photospheres, and the extragalactic distance scale (1993) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert Kirshner [3] |
Doctoral students | Manisha Caleb |
Website | www |
Brian Paul Schmidt AC FRS FAA FTSE (born 24 February 1967) is a Distinguished Professor and astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. [4] [5] [6] He was the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU) from January 2016 to January 2024. [7] [8] [9] He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He previously held a Federation Fellowship and a Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. [2] 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.
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Schmidt, an only child, was born in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska. [10] [11]
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 university. [12] 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. [13]
He graduated with a BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. [14] He received his AM (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. [15] Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant. [16] [3] [17]
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. [10] [14]
Schmidt was a postdoctoral research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1993–1994) before moving on to the ANU's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1995.
In 1994, Schmidt and Nicholas B. Suntzeff formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team to measure the expected deceleration of the universe and the deceleration parameter (q0) using distances to Type Ia supernovae. In 1995, the HZT at a meeting at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian elected Schmidt as the overall leader of the HZT. Schmidt led the team from Australia and in 1998 in the HZT paper with first author Adam Riess the first evidence was presented that the universe's expansion rate is not decelerating; it is accelerating. [18] The team's observations were contrary to the then-current models, which predicted that the expansion of the universe should be slowing down, and when the preliminary results emerged Schmidt assumed it was an error and he spent the next six weeks trying to find the mistake. [19] But there was no mistake: contrary to expectations, by monitoring the brightness and measuring the redshift of the supernovae, they discovered that these billion-year old exploding stars and their galaxies were accelerating away from our reference frame. [20] This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. [20] The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe, such as the existence of dark energy. [20] The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science in 1998, and Schmidt was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Riess and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work. [20]
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, indicating that it is a very primitive star, probably formed during the first rush of star formation following the Big Bang. [21]
He is the chairman of the board of directors of Astronomy Australia Limited, [22] and he serves on the management committee of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO). [23] In July 2012 Schmidt was given a three-year appointment to sit on the Questacon Advisory Council. [24] As of March 2017, Schmidt serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors. [25]
On 24 June 2015 it was announced Schmidt would replace Ian Young as the 12th Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, to commence his tenure on 1 January 2016. [26] The Chancellor of the ANU, Professor Gareth Evans, said, "Brian Schmidt is superbly placed to deliver on the ambition of ANU founders –to permanently secure our position among the great universities of the world, and as a crucial contributor to the nation ... We had a stellar field of international and Australian candidates, and have chosen an inspirational leader. ... Brian's vision, vitality, global stature and communication skills are going to take our national university to places it has never been before." [7] On 2 February 2023, Schmidt announced that he would be stepping down as vice chancellor at the end of the year. [8] [9]
The publicity that came with winning the Nobel Prize has given Schmidt the opportunity to help the public understand why science is important to society, and to champion associated causes. [19] [21]
Schmidt has received the Australian Government's inaugural Malcolm McIntosh Prize for achievement in the Physical Sciences in 2000, Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2000, the Australian Academy of Science's Pawsey Medal Medal in 2001, and the Astronomical Society of India's Vainu Bappu Medal in 2002. He was the Marc Aaronson Memorial Lecturer in 2005, the same year he received an ARC Federation Fellowship, [39] and in 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter. [40] [41] [42] In 2009, he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship. [43]
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.
Schmidt, along with Riess and Perlmutter, jointly won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their observations which led to the discovery of the accelerating universe. [40] [44]
Schmidt was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2013 Australia Day Honours. [45] He was called "Australian of the Year" for 2011 by The Australian newspaper. [27] He is a Fellow and council member of the Australian Academy of Science, The United States National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. [36] [39]
Schmidt, Adam Riess, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team shared in the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. [46]
Schmidt was awarded the Dirac Medal of the University of New South Wales in 2012 and the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour in 2015. [47] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012; [2] his certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:
Brian Schmidt is an internationally renowned researcher in cosmology and also in the physics of supernovae and gamma ray bursts. In particular, Schmidt's formation and leadership of the High-z Supernova Search Team led to the discovery that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, for which he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. This discovery completely changed our understanding of the universe. It showed that about 70% of the mass of our Universe is in a previously unknown form which is now usually referred to as 'Dark Energy'. [2]
He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE) in 2023. [48]
Schmidt is married to Jennifer Gordon. They met while they were both studying for their PhDs at Harvard –he in astrophysics and she in economics. They decided to settle in Australia, which he had already visited on several occasions to visit family. He now holds dual citizenship of Australia and the United States. [13]
He is not religious, being described as a "militant agnostic" with his tagline, "I don't know, and neither do you!" [49]
Schmidt and his wife own and operate Maipenrai Vineyard and Winery, a small winery established in 2000 in Sutton, near Canberra. The vineyard covers 1.1 hectares (2.7 acres), producing exclusively pinot noir grapes, and the wines have received favourable reviews. [50] [51] Schmidt has quipped that "it's easier to sell your wine when you have a Nobel prize". [52] At the 2011 Nobel Prize Ceremonies in Stockholm, he presented the King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with a bottle of wine from his winery.[ citation needed ]
In 2013, Schmidt was appointed to join the board of the federal government's Australian Wine Research Institute. The Institute's chairman Peter Dawson commented that Schmidt brings to the board "a unique combination of scientific excellence, wine industry knowledge and relevant board experience". [53]
In cosmology, the cosmological constant, alternatively called Einstein's cosmological constant, is the constant coefficient of a term that Albert Einstein temporarily added to his field equations of general relativity. He later removed it; however, much later it was revived and reinterpreted as the energy density of space, or vacuum energy, that arises in quantum mechanics. It is closely associated with the concept of dark energy.
Mount Stromlo Observatory located just outside Canberra, Australia, is part of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU). Australia's oldest telescope and several others at the observatory were destroyed by bushfire in 2003.
Saul Perlmutter is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.
The Supernova Cosmology Project is one of two research teams that determined the likelihood of an accelerating universe and therefore a positive cosmological constant, using data from the redshift of Type Ia supernovae. The project is headed by Saul Perlmutter at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with members from Australia, Chile, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he was a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe.
The High-Z Supernova Search Team was an international cosmology collaboration which used Type Ia supernovae to chart the expansion of the universe. The team was formed in 1994 by Brian P. Schmidt, then a post-doctoral research associate at Harvard University, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff, a staff astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The original team first proposed for the research on September 29, 1994, in a proposal called A Pilot Project to Search for Distant Type Ia Supernova to the CTIO. The original team as co-listed on the first observing proposal was: Nicholas Suntzeff (PI); Brian Schmidt (Co-I); R. Chris Smith, Robert Schommer, Mark M. Phillips, Mario Hamuy, Roberto Aviles, Jose Maza, Adam Riess, Robert Kirshner, Jason Spiromilio, and Bruno Leibundgut. The original project was awarded four nights of telescope time on the CTIO Víctor M. Blanco Telescope on the nights of February 25, 1995, and March 6, 24, and 29, 1995. The pilot project led to the discovery of supernova SN1995Y. In 1995, the HZT elected Brian P. Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo Observatory which is part of the Australian National University to manage the team.
Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Nicholas B. Suntzeff is an American astronomer and cosmologist. He is a university distinguished professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astronomical instrumentation. With Brian Schmidt he founded the High-z Supernova Search Team, which was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 to Schmidt and Adam Riess.
In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. Assuming that the lambda-CDM model of cosmology is correct, dark energy is the dominant component of the universe, contributing 68% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe while dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contribute 26% and 5%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons are nearly negligible. Dark energy's density is very low: 7×10−30 g/cm3, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it dominates the universe's mass–energy content because it is uniform across space.
The ANU College of Science is a college of the Australian National University (ANU) that delivers research and teaching in physical, life, mathematical, and environmental sciences, as well as science communication. The College is composed of the Research Schools of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, and Physics; Fenner School of Environment and Society; Mathematical Sciences Institute; and Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
The Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey was a supernova survey that ran from 1989 to 1995 at the University of Chile and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to measure a Hubble diagram out to redshifts of 0.1. It was founded by Mario Hamuy, José Maza Sancho, Mark M. Phillips, and Nicholas B. Suntzeff in 1989 out of discussions at the UC Santa Cruz meeting on supernovae on how to improve the Hubble diagram using Type Ia supernovae. It was also motivated by the suggestion of Allan Sandage to restart a supernova survey after the Sandage and Tammann survey failed due to poor quality photographic plates in 1986. The Survey built on the original supernova survey of Maza done at the f/3 Maksutov Camera at the Cerro Roble Observatory of the University of Chile between 1979 and 1984. The Survey used the CTIO Curtis Schmidt telescope with IIa-O photographic plates, each plate covering a field of 25 sq-deg on the sky. The plates were developed and sent to Santiago Chile the next morning and searched for supernovae at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chile. Any supernova candidates were then observed the next night using the 0.9m telescope at CTIO with a CCD camera. This was one of the first studies done in astronomy where the telescope time was scheduled to observe objects not yet discovered.
Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente is an astrophysicist working as a professor at the University of Barcelona. Her work has included research on type Ia supernovae. In 2004, she led the team that searched for the companion star to the white dwarf that became supernova SN 1572, observed by Tycho Brahe, among others. Ruiz-Lapuente's research on supernovae contributed to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
William Henry Press is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, computer scientist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1989, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "in recognition of important theoretical contributions to relativistic astrophysics and to cosmology" Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy. Press has been a member of the JASON defense advisory group since 1977 and is a past chair.
Craig Hogan is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics.
The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality is a nonfiction book by writer and professor Richard Panek and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 10, 2011.
Bruno Leibundgut is a Swiss astronomer born in Basel. His work focuses on supernovae and cosmology. He was a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team and participated in the planning, development and start of the operations of the Very Large Telescope.
Warrick John Couch is an Australian professional astronomer. He is currently a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He was previously the Director of Australia's largest optical observatory, the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). He was also the president of the Australian Institute of Physics (2015–2017), and a non-executive director on the Board of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. He was a founding non-executive director of Astronomy Australia Limited.
Peter M. Garnavich is a faculty member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame. His primary research area is the study of supernovae and their diversity. He has also studied gamma ray bursts and cataclysmic variable stars. Garnavich is a member of a supernova search team that contributed to the discovery of dark energy in 1998. At Notre Dame, Garnavich has developed and participated in collaborations using the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope. He was named a fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2024.
He delivered this speech at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute forum in Canberra on Tuesday 7 February.
many of the country's science and medical research sectors... could not plan their future direction because of stop-start funding and a poorly co-ordinated approach to research.
for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae
For eminent service as a global science leader in the field of physics through research in the study of astronomy and astrophysics, contributions to scientific bodies and the promotion of science education.
article also published in the Financial Times.