Dietrich Epp Schmidt

I'm a soil ecologist and data scientist. My work focuses on how land use and land management affect soil carbon and other biogeochemical processes in the soil.

USDA-NRCS

Lead statistician and data scientist for the Soil Carbon Monitoring Network. Responsible for network design and site selection; design a national scale network to establish regional validation data for soil carbon models of climate smart agriculture. Project management and data dashboards; leading the team building the data infrastructure to track the soil carbon monitoring network project to successful completion.

FDA-CFSAN-JFSAN

Environmental genomics and data dashboard developer working with the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Projects included supporting the FDA Wastewater Analysis Pipeline, a bioinformatics tool that provided the data to track SARS-SC2 Covid strain abundances in wastewater samples at a national scale; developing a R Shiny Dashboard app to interrogate NCBI pathogen clusters to accelerate source tracing work for the regulatory genomnnics team; and developing sequence analysis pipelines to support FDA research objectives related to antibiotic resistance in environmental Salmonella.

NSF Fellow – Food, Energy, Water Nexus

This NSF-funded fellowship for professional development and transdisciplinary research, addressing issues related to the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus.

Graduate Research Assistant: Soil Microbiology,

Soil carbon and microbiome analyses : The Global Soil Ecology and Education Network (GLUSEEN), the Detrital Input and Removal Treatment project (DIRT), Farming Systems Project (USDA-ARS), and Plant Health Project (USDA-ARS). Implemented amplicon and shotgun sequence analysis pipelines. Taught graduate level course in sequence analysis (2017).

PhD Land Use and Soil Ecosystems,

Topic: Augmenting sequencing technology for better inference in soil microbiome analysis; University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Major Professor: Dr. Stephanie Yarwood

MS Soil Microbiology and Urban Ecology,

Topic: Global biodiversity loss in urban soils; University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Major Professor: Dr. Stephanie Yarwood

B.A., Biology,

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD