Assistant Prof. Dr. Sandy Schmidt

About Sandy Schmidt

Sandy Schmidt completed her Ph.D. in 2015 in the group of Prof. Uwe Bornscheuer at the University of Greifswald in the field of protein engineering and enzymatic cascade reactions.

After a research stay at Delft University of Technology as postdoctoral fellow within the group of Assoc. Prof. Frank Hollmann, she was working as a group leader at Graz University of Technology.

Starting from April 2020 on, Dr. Schmidt has been Assist. Prof. and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen within the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy.

Research in the Schmidt lab exploits the powerful reactivity and selectivity of enzymes from secondary metabolite pathways for the production of natural products and their analogs for pharmaceutical applications.

The two main lines of research are:

1. the design and assembly of synthetic metabolic pathways and (chemo)enzymatic cascades for biocatalytic applications using synthetic biology tools; and
2. the development of new concepts for electron transfer pathways in microorganisms.

About the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy (GRIP)

The Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy (GRIP) is embedded in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen.

We are an institute with 8 research units, spanning a spectrum of pharmaceutical science research from medicinal chemistry and bioanalysis to the design, discovery and delivery of new biopharmaceutical drugs.

Our scientists are working hard to unravel the mechanisms which lead to diseases like cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, understand how enzymes can be engineered to produce medicinal compounds in a “green way”, and design innovative nanomedicines.

New biological models are combined with micro- and nanotechnologies to realize advanced in vitro technologies like organ-on-a-chip to both reduce the use of animals in drug testing and directly probe biological processes in more natural microenvironments.

Researchers in pharmacotherapy seek to better understand how to treat patients using new precision medicine approaches, while our epidemiologists delve into the causes of disease in larger populations. GRIP is a multidisciplinary institute that stands at the forefront of innovation of the pharmaceutical sciences.

We welcome students from around the world to our PhD program!