Schmidt is a senior postdoctoral fellow at University of Vienna. His research interests include phylogenetics and phylogenomics (methods, development and application; TREE-PUZZLE (http://www.tree-puzzle.de/), IQ-Tree (http://www.iqtree.org/)) and evolution at the species and gene level.

He received his PhD in computer science at Düsseldorf University in 2003 is now based in the Center of Integrative Bioinformatics at University of Vienna.