Dr. Britney Schmidt is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. Inspired by understanding our home planet and searching for life beyond Earth, she and her team develop robotic tools and instruments to study Earth’s poles and other planets.  Exploring Antarctica’s ice shelves and glaciers and the oceans beneath them with their robot Icefin, Schmidt and her team help to capture the impacts of changing climate, while understanding analogs for Ocean Worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa. Icefin is a robotic under ice vehicle built by a team of students and staff that can be deployed through thin holes in the ice and swim out to map the ocean, ice and seafloor conditions below ice shelves and glaciers. The team has used Icefin to explore underneath the McMurdo, Ross, and Fimbul Ice Shelves and Thwaites Glacier, working with NASA, NSF, Antarctica New Zealand, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Norwegian Polar Institute.  Icefin’s first campaigns in Greenland will begin spring 2025. Through the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), Schmidt and colleagues from the US and UK deployed Icefin below Thwaites Glacier, showing for the first time how the grounding line of this rapidly changing system was melting.  In recognition of the work of the ITGC team, she and colleague Peter Davis were named to the 100 Most Influential People of 2023 by Time Magazine.  She has also been recognized by the Explorer’s Club as an EC 50 member, highlighting innovative explorers.  

Schmidt received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Arizona, and PhD in Geophysics and Space Physics from UCLA. She has been involved with NASA spacecraft, including the Europa Clipper and Dawn missions and helped develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory, Europa Lander and Enceladus Orbilander concepts. Schmidt has conducted nine field seasons in Antarctica and three in the Arctic.

Language spoken: English

Photo credit: Peter Kimball