Marian Schmidt

The Schmidt lab focuses on microbial community diversity, metabolic activity, and genome evolution in aquatic environments. Students will gain experience with microbial ecology and computational tools. As an example project, students can characterize the microbial communities in marine sediments associated with oyster beds to understand the impact of oyster farming. Climate change dramatically impacts freshwater ecosystems, which are becoming warmer, more acidic, and nutrient rich. The collective influence of the microbial inhabitants of these ecosystems, despite their tiny size, can have an immense impact on water quality. However, we lack fundamental knowledge on the ecology and evolution of these aquatic microbial systems. Research in the lab focuses on how aquatic environments and microhabitats influence microbial community diversity, composition, metabolic activity, and genome evolution. To address these topics, our lab uses a combination of field work, molecular methods, and computational tools.  

Title: Assistant Professor

Department: Microbiology

Roles: Faculty Investigator, Potential MFF (REU) Host, Potential Undergraduate Mentor

Research Areas: Agriculture Research, Animal Hosts, Bacteria, Disease Ecology and Evolution, Genetics, Genomics and Cell Biology of Infection, Microbiota and Microbiomes

Lab: https://marschmilab.github.io/

Email: marschmi@cornell.edu