Dominic Schmidt

Biography

Dr. Schmidt is a Strategy Consultant at L.E.K. Consulting in London where he works as a strategic adviser to the biopharma and life sciences industry. He received his Ph.D. in Oncology from the University of Cambridge where he combined experimental and computational approaches across multiple species to study how gene-regulation and genomes are evolving. Before getting his Ph.D., he received his German diploma degree in biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and the Free University of Berlin.

Synopsis

Evolution of Vertebrate Transcriptional Regulator Binding

Vertebrates contain hundreds of different cell types that develop and maintain their phenotypic identity by a combination of genomic and epigenomic regulation. What are the regulatory mechanisms that enable one vertebrate genome to give rise to this magnificent diversity? And how are these mechanisms exploited over evolutionary time to allow for divergence and to give rise to new functions and ultimately species?