Susanne V. Schmidt studied biology at the University of Cologne. She graduated in 2009 investigating the modulation of dendritic cell function by tumor cells at the Institute for Virology in Cologne. In 2010 Susanne Schmidt joined as a PostDoc the Genomics & Immunoregulatory Group at the LIMES Institute in Bonn. Since 2017 Susanne is a member of the Eicke Latz Group. She is a certified clinical monitor and holds further educational certificates in the fields of Genomic Data Science, Machine Learning, Psychology, Positive Psychiatry and Mental Health. Her current research is focused on the decipherment of epigenetic and transcriptional programming of peripheral monocytes during SARS-CoV-2 infection, identification of biomarkers for patients at risk to develop hyperinflammatory immune reactions, monitoring of epigenetic alterations in brain tumors and the role of TAM receptors in the regulation of myeloid cell programming.
The Susanne Schmidt laboratory seeks to identify biomarkers and develop stratification systems for patients at risk for hyperinflammatory immuneresponses by using deep immunoprofiling approaches.
Our laboratory is set up to characterize immuneresponses on epigenetic, transcriptomal and protein level in the course of diverse inflammatory diseases. We make use of in-house generated immunoassays to track immune responses to danger signals in whole blood, profile cytokine expression patterns using multiplexing bead-based assays and characterize the activation states of monocytes in peripheral blood by flow cytometry. Especially monocytes as majordrivers of inflammation are of special interest, as we aim to elaborate molecular mechanisms of adaptive monocyte programming by bioinformatics analysis of transcriptional and epigenetics data.
