Jens Schmidt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology within the College of Human Medicine. At MSU, Schmidt’s laboratory will use a combination of cell biological and biophysical approaches to explain how human cells maintain their genomic integrity, which is an important barrier for cancer formation.
He received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and his Ph.D. in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied the molecular mechanisms of chromosome segregation with Dr. Iain Cheeseman. Dr. Schmidt went on to complete his postdoctoral work with Dr. Tom Cech in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. During this time he studied the recruitment of telomerase to telomeres, a pathway critical for cancer cell survival, using genome editing and single molecule live cell imaging approaches.
