Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and is interested in modeling past, present and future climate. Since February 2021, he has been acting Senior Advisor on Climate to the NASA Administrator. He works on developing and improving coupled climate models and, in particular, is interested in how their results can be compared to paleoclimatic proxy data. He has worked on assessing the climate response to multiple forcings, including solar irradiance, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and greenhouse gases.

He received a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University College London and was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research. He was cited by Scientific American as one of the 50 Research Leaders of 2004, and has worked on education and outreach with the American Museum of Natural History, the College de France and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and is the co-author with Josh Wolfe of “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” (W. W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers. He was awarded the inaugural AGU Climate Communications Prize and was the EarthSky Science communicator of the year in 2011.

He is the principal investigator on the GISS Earth System Model, which uses NASA High Performance computing facilities, and is working on improving data analytics to make the optimum use of the massive amounts of output data that this model and similar projects worldwide generate. His 2014 TED talk on climate modelling has been viewed over a million times.