Johannes A. Schmid takes up professorship in the field of Cardiovascular Medicine

Johannes Schmid specializes in researching inflammatory processes and, together with his team, investigates how acute and chronic inflammation affect the development and progression of various diseases. Inflammatory processes play a role in many cancers, but are also causally involved in thrombotic and cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes. He and his team study these processes at a molecular and cellular level using modern preclinical models and by examining healthy and diseased individuals. He is particularly interested in a systematic, integrative analysis of the transition from a healthy state, through various pre-morbidities, to a clinically manifest disease. His goal is to analyze molecular and clinical data sets, including genetic and epigenetic factors, to understand biological aging processes that are accelerated by chronic inflammation.

In the human medicine program, he teaches aspects of cell physiology and biological functional systems and their regulation and imparts knowledge of scientific work, where he also supervises theses dealing with the relationships between lifestyle factors and clinical laboratory values. In the international doctoral program at MedUni Vienna, he holds seminars on methods of fife sciences and the use of scientific software and databases and he participates in the basic seminars of two thematic areas (Vascular Biology and Molecular Signal Transduction). In particular, he would like to promote training in the field of biomedical data science and systems medicine.  

Johannes Schmid studied food and biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, where he already examined cells from patients with a rare hereditary disease during his diploma thesis. He completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna's Faculty of Medicine at what is now the Institute of Pathophysiology, where he researched transport processes in liver cells. After a two-year postdoctoral period at the Novartis Research Institute, Vienna, in the field of dermatology, he returned to the Faculty of Medicine (today the Medical University of Vienna) and began investigating inflammatory processes at the Institute of Vascular Biology and Thrombosis Research. After his habilitation, he went on sabbatical to Yale University Medical School for about a year. Back in Vienna, he and four other scientists founded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cancer Research, of which he was deputy director for three years. After a second habilitation in biochemistry, he returned to the Vascular Biology Institute, where he founded a special research programme as a network of 8 to 10 clinical and basic research groups, which he coordinated as spokesperson.