About

Nikola Schmidt is a senior researcher and head of the Centre for Governance of Emerging Technologies at the Institute of International Relations Prague, and a lecturer on planetary security, space security and space law at Masaryk University. He serves on the Czech delegation to the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) and as national delegate to UN COPUOS on space security and planetary defense.

His research develops normative and cosmopolitan frameworks for governing technologies whose consequences outrun existing institutions: planetary defense against asteroids, space resources, settlement of the Moon and Mars, high-energy systems in space, and AI-mediated information ecosystems. Methodologically he combines ethical and philosophical analysis of global governance with data science approaches to disinformation and narrative tracking.

He led the multidisciplinary planetary defense project funded by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (2018 to 2021), which brought together astronomers, space engineers, international lawyers and political scientists and produced two edited volumes with Springer: Planetary Defense (2019) and Governance of Emerging Space Challenges (2022). His articles appear in Nature Communications, Acta Astronautica, Space Policy, Futures and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Before academia he co-founded and led a software company and worked for People in Need in Afghanistan. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Charles University (2016), with a dissertation on the birth of cyber as a national security agenda, and took part in the NASA and ESA co-funded planetary defense project of the International Space University in 2015.