Brian Schmidt
Meet Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt, a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy whose groundbreaking research on the accelerating universe earned him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Last updated 3 August 2026
Brian Schmidt is Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University, of which he has been a faculty member since 1995. From 2016 to 2023, he was the university’s 12th Vice Chancellor and President. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (London), as well as a Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He also serves on a number of boards and councils, including Australia’s National Science and Technology Council and Singapore’s Research Innovation and Enterprise Council.
Prof Schmidt has worked across many areas of astronomy, including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational wave transients, exo-planets and metal-poor stars. In 2000, he received the Australian Government’s inaugural Malcolm McIntosh Award for achievement in the physical sciences. This was followed by the 2006 Shaw Prize for Astronomy and the 2007 Gruber Prize for Cosmology. For his work on the accelerating universe, he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter. In 2013, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.