Professor Brian Schmidt is one of the highest profile astronomers within Australia. He is widely known for his work using supernovae to probe the expansion of the universe. Professor Schmidt lead the High-Z SN Search team which (along with the Supernovae Cosmology Project) found that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating rather the decelerating. This is currently one of key unresolved problems in modern physics. For this work Professor Schmidt has received wide recognition, including the Malcolm McIntosh Prize and the Shaw Prize.
He is currently leading the Skymapper project, which will obtain imaging of the entire southern sky at optical wavelengths.
Astronomers believe our Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. Brian Schmidt will describe the life of the Universe that we live in, and how astronomers have used observations to trace our Universe's history back more than 13 Billion years. With this data a puzzling picture has been pieced together where 96% of the Cosmos is made up of two mysterious substances, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These two mysterious forms of matter are in a battle for domination of the Universe, and Schmidt will describe new experiments that are monitoring the struggle between Dark Energy and Dark Matter, trying better to understand these elusive pieces of our Universe, and predict the ultimate fate of the Cosmos.
http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~brian/