PROF. Dr. Oliver Schmidt is a cell biologist and group leader at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, where his lab studies lipid metabolism in yeast. In 2019, he was awarded the second Lipotype Excellence Award (LEA) – at a moment when he was still working mostly alone at the bench, navigating the uncertain transition from senior postdoc to independent group leader. The data he generated with that award fed directly into a published paper, and is still shaping the research questions he pursues today with his team. We sat down with him to hear the story.
There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes with early-career independence in science. You have the ideas. You may even have the space. What you often don’t have yet is the funding, the team, or the track record that makes the next grant feel like a sure thing. In 2019, Oliver was in exactly that position.
“Of course, everyone’s worried at that career stage,” he says. “It’s totally normal.”
He had just published a major paper from his postdoc — on a new protein degradation pathway regulating sphingolipid metabolism amongst other things — and had a couple of promising follow-ups in mind. One of them would require specific lipidomic analysis. Then he saw the LEA announcement.
“The format was appealing because it didn’t require that much writing. We had just published a very nice paper, so we had the setting. And this setting suggested follow-ups that would fit with the LEA concept — and that would really require a specific lipidomic setup.”
Oliver applied and got the second prize. And, as he puts it: “It came at exactly the right time.”
Olya: You were essentially working alone in the lab at that point?
Oliver: Yes, I was still in the transition of becoming independent. I didn’t have any own people at that time, and I was still part of the team of my postdoc advisor David Teis. So, I prepared the samples myself. And I still do things by myself in the lab, even nowadays — not as much as it used to be, but I’m still trying to be at the bench at least a couple of hours a week.
Olya: What question were you trying to answer with the lipidomic analysis?
Oliver: Previously, we had identified this protein degradation pathway. We call it the EGAD pathway, for endosome and Golgi-associated degradation. We knew it regulates sphingolipids, but we had also come across other metabolic enzymes involved in other lipid classes. So, we wanted a bigger picture — we wanted to see if this is maybe a system that regulates lipid metabolism in a more holistic way. Not just sphingolipids, but other things as well.
What we found was quite peculiar changes in the cells we sent for analysis. When the EGAD pathway is missing, certain membrane proteins accumulate, and they need space in the membrane. They need a particular type of membrane. And we could very nicely show that the cells start to adapt; specifically, they modify the length or thickness of their membranes to accommodate the proteins they can no longer properly degrade.
What are Sphingomyelins?
Sphingomyelins (CerPCho, or SM) belong to the group of phosphosphingolipids within the sphingolipids.
They are vital to the formation of lipid rafts and required for the activity of raft-dependent membrane proteins such as some ion channels.
Olya: That sounds counterintuitive: typically, we would expect the proteins to adapt, not the lipids?
Oliver: Exactly. That was quite a remarkable finding. It isn’t other degradation systems that adapt — it’s actually the lipids. If you come from the protein side, it’s not what you usually look at. And therefore it gave us a very nice change of perspective.
Olya: Did that finding shape what your lab is doing now?
Oliver: Yes. The data I just mentioned contributed to a new publication from David’s [Teis] lab. But we also observed peculiar changes in sterols, and one of my PhD students has been following up on that. We got very promising preliminary data, and I am currently writing another grant to fund it.
Paper-wise, from this one LEA award, there are going to be at least two papers that came directly out of it.
Olya: On the practical side, how was the collaboration with Lipotype?
Oliver: I very much appreciated the output format, the website-based style. The analysis was thorough. Everything I needed, even when I was digging into raw data, I could usually find it quite easily. And I was particularly glad for the statistical analysis as I’m not a big statistician. The principal component analysis immediately showed quite nicely, graphically, that the samples were different and that the replicates clustered together well.
One thing I would flag for the future: I prepared the cell lysates myself before sending them, and while it worked out fine, I was a little worried. Glass bead lysis is done a little differently in every lab — different kinds of beads, different machines. I would have felt more comfortable just sending the cell pellets directly and having Lipotype do all the extraction steps. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of step where standardization really matters, in my opinion.
Olya: You mentioned the award came at exactly the right time. What did that mean for you personally?
Oliver: It was 2019, and 2020 was a critical milestone in my qualification agreement: the step that would determine whether I could transition into a permanent position. So, it was good to show that I had already acquired a grant myself. Even if money-wise it was a smaller grant compared to others, it still mattered. Reputationally, it was helpful.
It took another year after that to get bigger startup funding to really hire people. So, for quite some time, I was working mostly alone. But being embedded in the lab where I’d done my postdoc, still part of the scientific community in Innsbruck — that helped a lot. And eventually, after some time of sharing the lab space, when my postdoc advisor moved on to run his own institute, I could basically take over. I think that kind of career trajectory would not have been possible anywhere else.
Olya: Innsbruck sounds like more than just a workplace.
Oliver: It really is. It’s a beautiful place, obviously, with lots of nature that keeps you grounded. But also scientifically, it’s a really cool place to be. We have a strong cell biology and biochemistry community. A really collaborative, productive membrane biology group. I enjoy it a lot. And I’m really grateful for getting offered a realistic chance to build a life and stay at one place early in my career. I try to give back to the community where I can. Teaching is a big part of that, and I enjoy it very much. My mother is a school teacher, so maybe that’s where it comes from. I enjoy giving lectures, but what I enjoy most is teaching small groups of students directly in the lab. When you’ve been lucky enough to land somewhere that supported you the way Innsbruck supported me, I think it matters to pass that on.
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Olya: Would you like to see the LEA continue?
Oliver: I would be very grateful if there were another round. Obviously, it wouldn’t make sense for me to apply again, but I know there are so many people in similar situations who would really benefit. At the career stage I was at, the full analysis — I think it was around 10,000 to 12,000 EUR back then — is really significant money. And if you have a good idea of how to use it, it can open up a whole new direction.
I’d love to see it become more permanent. Something that comes around every three or four years would be wonderful. It is, after all, an investment. And as I said — from my one award, at least two papers will have come directly out of it.
Oliver is an associate professor of cell biology at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria. The LEA (Lipotype Excellence Award) is a research grant awarded by Lipotype to support researchers whose work stands to benefit from access to professional lipidomics expertise. His lipidomic data contributed to a Nature Communications paper published in 2024 (Weyer, Schwabl, Tang et al., 2024, PMID: 39461958), and continues to inform ongoing work in his lab on sterol metabolism in yeast.
