V. Balaji joined Schmidt Futures as Distinguished Fellow in June 2022. Balaji will bring together our Talent Venture team and our Science team, and bring his thought leadership towards new programs in the climate and computational sciences.

Balaji joins us 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 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 (currently to the UK Met Office).

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

He is interested in, in short, everything… but more narrowly, the application of advanced technologies and methods to hard science problems, and broadening access to these tools in underserved communities and the developing world.