A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the climate science blog RealClimate.

He was educated at The Corsham School, earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. Schmidt worked on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing.

As of 2024, Schmidt heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was named for the director position in June 2014 as its then deputy director, becoming to the third person to hold this post, which had been vacant after the retirement of James E. Hansen. In an interview with Science News, Schmidt said that he wanted to continue the institute’s work on climate modeling and to expand its work on climate impacts and astrobiology.