In his role at the State Department, Schmitt serves as the team lead for European energy security and diplomacy engagement in the Northern European region, drawing on his hard science and technology background, performed on all four continents of the Atlantic rim, to develop and implement novel policy strategies for the advancement of joint U.S. and EU shared priorities at the intersection of energy and security geopolitics, directly advising senior administration officials from the State Department and the White House National Security Council, among others across the U.S. Government.

Previously, Schmitt served as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow while pursuing masters and doctoral-level research in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on experimental cosmology research. While at Penn, Benjamin’s research primarily concentrated on the development of novel millimeter-wavelength imaging technologies framed through the design and integration of ACTPol, a polarization-sensitive receiver upgrade for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, located at over 5,190 meters in elevation on an extinct stratovolcano in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where Schmitt led field deployment operations over a several year period. 

Benjamin’s ACTPol research was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program award. Schmitt has also previously served as a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellow to the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and before that served as an X-Ray Diagnostics Researcher focusing on inertial confinement fusion research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern German Languages and Cultures, and Mathematics.