Plenaries

Sunday, 22 February 2026, 05:00 PM (GMT)

Dr. Britney Schmidt is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. She and her team develop robotic tools and instruments to study Earth’s poles and other planets. Exploring Earth’s ice shelves and glaciers and the oceans beneath them with their robot Icefin, Schmidt and her team help to capture the impacts of changing climate, while understanding analogs for Ocean Worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa. She has conducted nine field seasons in Antarctica and four in the Arctic. Her team has used Icefin to explore underneath the McMurdo, Ross, and Fimbul Ice Shelves and Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica and Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland, working with NASA, NSF, Heising-Simons, Antarctica New Zealand, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Norwegian Polar Institute. A native of Tucson, AZ, she received a B.S. from the University of Arizona, and PhD from UCLA. Britney has a long history of NASA spacecraft involvement, including the Europa Clipper and Dawn missions and helped develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory, Europa Lander and Enceladus Orbilander concepts.