Dr. Schneider is an Astronomer at Steward Observatory, and the Project Instrument Scientist for HST’s Near Infra-red Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. His research interests are centered on the formation, evolution, and characterization of extrasolar planetary systems and have focused on the direct detection of sub-stellar and planetary mass companions to young and near-by stars and the circumstellar environments from which such systems arise and interact. In concert with his scientific investigations of circumstellar dust and debris disks, and co-orbital bodies they may harbor, he has played a leading role in the development of very high contrast space-based coronagraphic imaging systems and techniques producing spatially resolved scattered light images of nascent, and more evolved, exoplanetary disks and debris systems.