[10][14] Schmidt was a postdoctoral research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1993–1994) before moving on to the ANU's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1995.

Schmidt led the team from Australia and in 1998 in the HZT paper with first author Adam Riess the first evidence was presented that the universe's expansion rate is not decelerating; it is accelerating.

[18] The team's observations were contrary to the then-current models, which predicted that the expansion of the universe should be slowing down, and when the preliminary results emerged Schmidt assumed it was an error and he spent the next six weeks trying to find the mistake.

[19] But there was no mistake: contrary to expectations, by monitoring the brightness and measuring the redshift of the supernovae, they discovered that these billion-year old exploding stars and their galaxies were accelerating away from our reference frame.

[20] The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science in 1998, and Schmidt was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Riess and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.

[21] He is the chairman of the board of directors of Astronomy Australia Limited,[22] and he serves on the management committee of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).

[25] On 24 June 2015 it was announced Schmidt would replace Ian Young as the 12th Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, to commence his tenure on 1 January 2016.

He was the Marc Aaronson Memorial Lecturer in 2005, the same year he received an ARC Federation Fellowship,[39] and in 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.

[43] Schmidt and the other members of the High-Z Team (the set defined by the co-authors of Riess et al. 1998) shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Supernova Cosmology Project (the set defined by the co-authors of Perlmutter et al. 1999) for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Schmidt, along with Riess and Perlmutter, jointly won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their observations which led to the discovery of the accelerating universe.

In particular, Schmidt's formation and leadership of the High-z Supernova Search Team led to the discovery that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, for which he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The vineyard covers 1.1 hectares (2.7 acres), producing exclusively pinot noir grapes, and the wines have received favourable reviews.

[52] At the 2011 Nobel Prize Ceremonies in Stockholm, he presented the King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with a bottle of wine from his winery.