Schmidt, Brian, 1967-
Oral history interview with Brian Schmidt, 2021 June 5.
Interview with Brian Schmidt, Distinguished Professor and Vice Chancellor and President of the Australian National University. Schmidt surveys the Covid crisis from his perspective at ANU, and he describes his current interests in cosmology. He recounts his childhood in Montana and Alaska in support of his fathers career in fisheries biology, and he describes his undergraduate education as a dual major in physics and astronomy at the University of Arizona. Schmidt describes the opportunities that led to his graduate work at Harvard, where he worked under the direction of Bob Kirshner and where he met and developed a formative relationship with Adam Riess on supernovae research. He explains his decision to remain at Harvard for his postdoctoral research and he narrates the origins of the High-Z collaboration and its interactions with Saul Perlmutters team at Berkeley. Schmidt describes his postdoctoral appointment at ANU as leader of High-Z, and he describes how the collaboration discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe and the process of communicating its findings. He describes the buzz leading to the Nobel Prize and his subsequent focus on the SkyMapper project. Schmidt discusses his responsibilities as Vice Chancellor which overlap strongly with Australian national policy, and he describes how he sees the reality of climate change in his 21 years of grape growing. At the end of the interview, Schmidt reflects on how the High-Z discovery has changed astronomy broadly, and he conveys a sense of wonder at the accidental nature by which the team arrived at its discovery.
Brian Paul Schmidt, Australian- American astrophysicist. He obtained B.Sc in Physics and Astronomy, University of Arizona (1989), a MA in Astronomy, Harvard University (1992), and a Ph.D. in Astonomy, Harvard University (1993). He has spent the majority of his career thus-far at Australian National University, where he has worked as researcher, professor, and vice-chancellor. Schmidt was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 alongside Saul Perlmutter and Adam G. Riess.
Schmidt, Brian, 1967-
Australian National University
Harvard University.
Cosmology
COVID-19 (Disease)
Nobel Prize winners
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Oral histories. aat
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Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA