Email: susanne.schmid@schulich.uwo.ca
Professor of Neurobiology
Vice-Dean of Basic Medical Sciences

Dr. Susanne Schmid studied Biology in Tübingen (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil). She was trained as an electrophysiologist (patch-clamp recordings in brain slices) during her PhD working at the University Eye Hospital in Tübingen under Dr. Guenther and Professor Zrenner. Dr. Schmid started her own independent group in 2000 in the Animal Physiology Department (Professor Schnitzler) at the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 2006, she spent a year at the University of Toronto as a Heisenberg Fellow working with John Yeomans, before she moved to Western in 2007.

Dr. Schmid was always interested in synaptic plasticity, first during retinal development, and later, when she founded her own group, in relation to behavioural plasticity and learning. Habituation of startle is an excellent model to explore cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning in mammals. Habituation is also a sensory filtering mechanism, therefore she started to study other sensory filtering mechanisms as well, most importantly prepulse inhibition. Both habituation and prepulse inhibition are also measured in humans and are clinically highly relevant.