Cz Biohub Leadership

Karkanias’ background spans science (neuroscience); engineering (bioengineering, code development); technology (neural nets, machine learning, robotics); and business (founder of a software startup in the ’90s and then head of clinical operations for the human health division at Merck). He held the role of Partner at Microsoft for the past decade, leading Program Management for Information Management and Machine Learning in the Cloud + Enterprise Division. At CZ Biohub, in collaboration with partners at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; the University of California, San Francisco; and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Karkanias has built a world-class Data Science team. As CTO, along with CZ Biohub’s other technical Platform Leaders (Bioengineering, Computational Microscopy, Genomics, and Mass Spectrometry), he is helping to drive and support advances in bioinformatics, computational biology, image processing, and next-generation analytics.

Dr. Sandy Schmid joins the Biohub in 2020, bringing her career-long focus in cell biology to guide and amplify the scientific research of the internal team and the investigator program.

She joins the staff from the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, where she held the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair in Cellular and Molecular Biology and served as chair of the Department of Cell Biology.

Dr. Schmid was born in Vancouver, Canada and received her B.Sc. Degree (Honours) in Cell Biology at the University of British Columbia. She moved to the U.S. in 1980 for graduate studies with Jim Rothman at Stanford University. She was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow and Lucille P. Markey Scholar with Ira Mellman and Ari Helenius at Yale, and moved to The Scripps Research Institute as an Assistant Professor in 1988. She served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at TSRI from 2000-2012, before being recruited to UTSW.

She is a leader in the scientific community, whose research, published in over 150 papers, is directed towards elucidating the molecular mechanisms and regulation of clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), characterizing the differential regulation of CME in normal and cancer cells, and analyzing the structure and function of the GTPase, dynamin. She has received numerous awards, including the American Society for Cell Biology’s Women in Cell Biology Junior and Senior Career Recognition Awards, an NIH MERIT Award and the Arthur Kornberg and Paul Berg Lifetime Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences.

Schmid received a M.S. Degree in Executive Leadership from the University of San Diego and is committed to mentoring young scientists and future leaders. She gives frequent career development and time management seminars to postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty throughout the US.