Britney E. Schmidt

Britney Schmidt (born 1982/1983) is an American earth scientist and astrobiologist at Cornell University. She has conducted research on the melting of ice shelves in Antarctica and studied Jupiter's moon Europa.

In 2023, she was included on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world for her research on the Thwaites Glacier. She previously worked at Georgia Tech, and has been involved in projects with NASA. Schmidt was educated at the University of Arizona and University of California, Los Angeles.

Biography Britney Schmidt was born in 1982 or 1983, Schmidt spent a fifth year there and graduated from Arizona with a BA in physics in 2005. Five years later she earned a Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

From 2013 to 2021 she taught earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, first as an assistant professor and from 2019 as an associate professor. In 2021 she was hired to work at Cornell University as an associate professor of astronomy, earth, and atmospheric sciences. As of 2023, she is an associate professor of astronomy in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences and earth and atmospheric sciences in the Cornell University College of Engineering. Since 2016 Schmidt has served on the board of directors of The Planetary Society.

Projects Schmidt's research centers on both terrestrial and planetary sciences. Her work on polar oceans and ice shelves provides incite into important climate change impacts, and also guides her work on icy worlds of the outer Solar System.

Space research Schmidt began studying Europa, a moon of Jupiter known for having vast oceans,

Research on ice shelves Schmidt also used Icefin in research in Antarctica, studying how ice shelves were responding to climate change. Schmidt continued her ice shelf research at Cornell, co-publishing a paper in early 2023 on data that Icefin had gathered about Thwaites Glacier. The robot found that warm water was permeating weak portions of the glacier, potentially exacerbating the threat of the glacier melting. They also found a lower rate of melting than was previously estimated. In January 2024, Britney was named to the Explorers Club 50 (EC50) as a member of the 2024 class of "fifty people changing the world that the world needs to know about." In September 2024 she was named a laureate of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.