V. Balaji joined Schmidt Futures as Distinguished Fellow in June 2022, fresh from a 25 year career in Princeton University, during which time he served as head of the Modeling Systems Division at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, one of the world’s pioneers in climate modeling, from 2003-2021. In 2017 he was among the first recipients of President Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again award and through that has an academic appointment at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in Sorbonne Universités. He has served on US National Academies panels related to climate, computing, and geophysical data, and has been on scientific advisory boards to several US agencies and climate research institutions across the world, including currently to the UK Met Office.

He is interested in, in short, everything: but more narrowly, to the application of advanced science and technology to pressing problems of planetary scale, and widening access to these advances among underserved communities and in the developing world. At Schmidt Sciences, he leads the new Climate Institute to build a framework for analyzing pathways toward a carbon- and resource-neutral future through linked programs on climate modeling, land and ocean carbon, global freshwater, and energy planning with an eye to the Global South.

Balaji holds a PhD in Physics from the Ohio State University and a Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.