Sonja Schmid

Sonja Schmid is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Wageningen University. She studied Nanosciences at the University of Basel and earned her PhD in 2017 from TU Munich working in Thorsten Hugel’s lab, where she set up single-molecule fluorescence/FRET experiments, developed the pattern-recognition approach SMACKS to infer single-molecule kinetics, and uncovered diverse regulatory effects of protein conformational dynamics. She was awarded an SNF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship to strengthen her expertise in single-molecule biophysics in Cees Dekker’s lab at TU Delft, where she used solid-state and protein nanopores to develop new label-free sensing approaches (e.g. the NEOtrap). At the same time, she independently organized the ‘kinSoftChallenge’, now published as the first international benchmark study on single-molecule kinetics software. Since 2020, she is an elected member of the advisory board of the international FRET.community. In 2021, she set up her NanoDynamicsLab to develop new optical and electrical single-molecule techniques to study biomolecular dynamics beyond current detection limits