Francis John Schmidt

• Phone: (573)882-5668
• E-mail: SchmidtF@missouri.edu

MU Faculty Council Chair Frank Schmidt is Professor of Biochemistry in the School of Medicine and the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. After postdoctoral work at Wisconsin, he joined the MU faculty in July, 1978, as Assistant Professor, rising to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1993. He was a Founding Scientist and Scientific Advisor to Pinnacle Pharmaceuticals, a startup biotechnology company, and has served on numerous review panels for the National Institutes of Health, as well as on the editorial board of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Together with his late wife, Prof. Sharon Stevens, he has two grown children.

Prof. Schmidt's teaching interests are in the development of interactive, inquiry-based science education for Undergraduate, Graduate and Professional Students. He serves as Principal Investigator for the NSF-supported CUES (Connecting Undergraduates to the Enterprise of Science) project. His research is in nucleic acid biochemistry and in genomically-guided strategies for the identification of novel antimicrobial compounds. He was Chair of the University of Missouri System Intercampus Faculty Council for 2006-2007. He received MU's Human Rights Achievement Award in 1995, was named Honors College Professor of the Year in 2000 and was awarded a William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2007.