Dr. Schmidt's lab invents and applies protein engineering technologies to study how cells sense, integrate and exchange information, how pathologic changes in these processes relate to health and disease, and provide insights into new therapies. They are developing novel optogenetic reagents that allow us to systematically perturb specific ion channels and signaling receptors in a time- and amplitude-variant manner. His lab combines these molecular reagents into an experimental framework in which all families of ion channels and receptors can be independently controlled, and their contribution to diverse cellular signal transduction circuits investigated.
