Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Владимир Иванович Вернадский) (March 12, 1863, N.S. [ February 28, O.S. ] – January 6 1945) was a Russian mineralogist and geochemist who first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word biosphere was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky had met in 1911. Vernadsky is considered one of the precursors of ecology.

In Vernadsky's theory of how the earth develops, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are the essential features of the earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This is in contrast to Darwin's theory of Natural selection, which looks at each individual species, rather than at its relationship to a subsuming principle.

Vernadsky was the founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine (1918).

Vernadsky's most important works are:

• Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924
• The Biosphere, published in Russian 1926 (English translation 1998)