Daniel Schmidt

Daniel Schmidt received his Diploma degree in biochemistry from the University of Tübingen in Germany and trained with Roderick MacKinnon at the Rockefeller University in New York for graduate studies investigating how the lipid chemistry and mechanical state of the membrane modulate ion channel function. His PhD was recognized with the David Baltimore Fellowship Recognizing Exceptional Scientific Promise and a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds predoctorol fellowship. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Edward Boyden and funded by a Damon Runyon Fellowship, he engineered versatile technologies at the intersection of physiology and synthetic biology for the study of cellular signal processing. Daniel’s research is driven by the incomplete understanding of how cells sense, integrate and exchange information about their environment, how pathologic changes in these processes relate to disease, and how insights into these processes can offer new therapeutic points of intervention. Daniel then went on to start a tenure-track faculty job at U. Minnesota.