Cell Biology Chair Schmid achieves scientific hat trick
By Deborah Wormser
If Dr. Sandra Schmid played for the Dallas Stars hockey team, her most recent scientific accomplishments would be considered a hat trick, the sports term for a cluster of three outstanding feats.
The Chair of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center recently was elected one of only six new foreign associate members of the European Molecular Biology Organization. She presented her inaugural talk at the group’s prestigious 50th anniversary meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, on Oct. 30, 2014.
Also in October, she delivered the 7th Annual Rosalind Kornfeld Lecture for Distinguished Women in Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
On Dec. 9, the American Society for Cell Biology/Women in Cell Biology (ASCB/WICB) committee presented its 2014 WICB Senior Leadership Award – open to both male and female leaders in cell biology – to Dr. Schmid at the ASCB/WICB meeting in Philadelphia.
“I’m pleased to receive these recognitions, not only for myself, but for cell biology,” she said.
Dr. Schmid’s selection for the latter award made history. She is the first person recognized with the senior leadership award after having been selected for the WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research. In 1990, she won the junior award, given to an exceptional female scientist within six years of establishing an independent research program who “exhibits the potential for continuing at a high level of scientific endeavor and leadership.”
“Dr. Schmid is an internationally acclaimed cell biologist who has made fundamental contributions in the field of endocytosis, the process by which cells internalize nutrients, signaling molecules, and plasma membrane proteins. In particular, her research on the roles of the protein dynamin in these events is of fundamental importance to our understanding of intracellular transport,” a recent ASCB newsletter noted in its prize announcement.
Born in Vancouver, Canada, and holding dual citizenship, Dr. Schmid graduated from the University of British Columbia (cell biology, high honours). She earned her doctorate in biochemistry at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, in the laboratory of Dr. James Rothman, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. She then was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow and Lucille P. Markey Scholar at Yale University, where her mentors were Drs. Ira Mellman and Ari Helenius.
She was recruited to UT Southwestern to lead the Department of Cell Biology in 2012 after serving in the same position at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, for 12 years. While at Scripps, she earned an M.S. in Leadership from the business school at the University of California at San Diego.
Dr. Schmid was featured in an extensive interview on the “People Behind the Science” podcast episode.
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Dr. Schmid holds the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair in Cellular and Molecular Biology.
