Illustration of the US-Australian physicist Brian Schmidt (born 1967). Schmidt obtained his doctorate in 1993 from Harvard University. He formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team at Harvard, but led the research from Australia. In 2011, Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Perlmutter and Reiss for providing evidence that the universes expansion is accelerating. Schmidts observations of brightness and redshift of supernovae contradicted the previously held theory that the expansion of the universe was slowing down.