Claudia Schmidt-Dannert

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Credentials

PhD

Bio

Dr. Claudia Schmidt-Dannert is a Distinguished McKnight Professor and Kirkwood Chair of Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics. She is also the Director of the BioTechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota.

She completed her BS and MS in Biochemistry and Genetics at the TU Braunschweig and performed her PhD research at the National Research Center for Biotechnology (GBF, now Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research) in Braunschweig. She then moved to the University of Stuttgart, and after a brief postdoctoral time, led he Molecular Biotechnology Group in the Institute of Technical Biochemistry as “Habilitant”. In 1998, she received a habilitation-fellowship from the German Science Foundation for her research proposal on in vitro pathway evolution and with this project, joined 2018 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Prof. Frances Arnold’s group at the California Institute of Technology to carry out her research on “molecular breeding of pathways” using carotenoid biosynthesis as a model system. In 2000, she joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Research Summary

One area of current research focuses on the design self-organizing systems from genetically encoded protein building blocks for applications in biocatalysis, biosynthesis and as functional materials. We are also engineering microbial cells to produce living materials and biocomposites as well synthetic biofilms with tailored functions. Another long-standing interest in our lab is the discovery and design of biosynthetic pathways (for example from mushrooms) for the production of pharmaceutically relevant compounds.