Holger Schmidt received an M.S. degree in physics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1994, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995 and 1999, respectively. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2001. He is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds the Narinder Singh Kapany Chair of Optoelectronics. He directs the applied optics group and the W.M. Keck Center for Nanoscale Optofluidics, and has served as associate dean of research for the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering.
Schmidt has authored over 400 publications and several book chapters in various fields of optics. He edited the first Handbook of Optofluidics published with CRC Press. He is a principal investigator for the Center of Live Cell Genomics, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. He is a faculty member of the California Institiute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute , and the Storage Systems Research Center. He was elected fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America) in 2014, fellow of the IEEE in 2017, and fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2019. He received the Engineering Achievement Award from the IEEE Photonics Society for development of optofluidic waveguide technology in 2019 and the UC Santa Cruz Innovator of the Year Award in 2024.
His research interests include single-particle optics; integrated optofluidics; integrated optics for biomedical applications; nano-magneto-optics and nano-magnetism; time-resolved spectroscopy of molecules, semiconductors and nanostructures; quantum interference and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT); nonlinear optics; quantum optics; and all-optical semiconductor devices.