Brian P. Schmidt
| Brian Schmidt | |||
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Schmidt at the 2012 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
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| Born | Brian Paul Schmidt February 24, 1967 Missoula, Montana, United States |
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| Nationality | Australia and United States | ||
| Institutions | Australian National University | ||
| Alma mater | University of Arizona (1989), Harvard University (1993) | ||
| Thesis | Type II supernovae, expanding photospheres, and the extragalactic distance scale (1993) | ||
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Kirshner | ||
| Notable awards |
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| Spouse | Jennifer M. Gordon | ||
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Website msowww |
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Brian Paul Schmidt AC, FRS, FAA (born February 24, 1967) is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and he is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. 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, making him the only Montana-born Nobel laureate.
Schmidt, an only child, was born on February 24, 1967, in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.
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. 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.
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