Thomas D Schmittgen, Ph.D.

Thomas D. Schmittgen, Ph.D. is a professor and Chair in the Department of Pharmaceutics at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is the V. Ravi Chandran Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr. Schmittgen holds both undergraduate (Pharmacy) and graduate degrees (Pharmaceutics) from the Ohio State University. He was a National Research Service Award (NIH) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California from 1992-1995. He served on the faculty at Washington State University College of Pharmacy from 1995-2002. Dr. Schmittgen returned to the Ohio State University in 2002 where he remained on the faculty for 13 years, serving as chair of the Division of Pharmaceutics from 2000-2015. Dr. Schmittgen was hired at the University of Florida in 2015 through the UF Preeminence Initiative.

Dr. Schmittgen’s research focuses on noncoding RNAs and cancer with emphasis on the use of microRNAs as therapeutic or diagnostic agents. A paper he co-authored in 2001 describing the relative method of gene quantification has been cited over 105,000 times and was ranked in 2014 by the international journal Nature as the 21st most cited scientific article of all time. Dr. Schmittgen has been continuously funded by federal agencies (NIH, DOD) for the past 20 years. His lab was the first to establish a link between altered microRNA expression in pancreatic cancer. Dr. Schmittgen’s lab is currently developing exosomes/microvesicles as targeted drug delivery systems for the treatment of cancer. Dr. Schmittgen is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.