Gudmundur Stefansson

Gudmundur Stefansson is a Program Scientist in the Center for Astrophysics and Space at Schmidt Sciences. Previously, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and as a NASA Hubble Fellow at Princeton University. At UvA, he led a research group focused on detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets around nearby stars.

His work includes pioneering low-cost, nanofabricated Engineered Diffusers that enable space-quality photometric measurements from the ground, as well as key contributions to state-of-the-art radial velocity spectrographs aimed at detecting Earth-like planets, including the Habitable-zone Planet Finder and the NASA NEID spectrograph. He has authored over 160 publications spanning instrumentation, observational insights, and computational techniques. He has also served as Deputy Project Scientist, Architect, and Board Member for major experiments, including the Habitable-zone Planet Finder, the NASA NEID Spectrograph, and the Terra Hunting Experiment.

At Schmidt Sciences, Gudmundur serves as the Instrument Scientist for the Lazuli Space Observatory and supports the broader mission of the Astrophysics & Space Center.

Gudmundur holds a PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics from The Pennsylvania State University and a BSc in Physics from the University of Iceland. His PhD thesis received the 2020 Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, awarded annually to a PhD thesis in North America deemed unusually important to astronomy.