Meet Dr. Tobi Schmidt and The Bio:Catalyst

Welcome. I’m Dr. Tobi Schmidt, a Stanford-trained immunologist and the founder of Bio:Logic. I started Bio:Logic on a simple belief: every student has real ability in science, and mentorship is what turns that ability into achievement.

No one becomes a scientist or physician alone. Ask anyone in research or medicine, and they can name the mentors who shaped them. I didn’t come from a scientific family. In high school, I didn't even know what a PhD was! I found my way into science largely on my own. The mentors came later, once I was already working in the field, and my road was longer for it.

Over more than thirty years in biomedical research, biotech drug discovery, and science education, I’ve seen what the right guidance at the right time makes possible. Now I bring that experience directly to high school students, one-on-one, so they don’t have to find their way alone.

A Gap Decade in Biotech

Some students take a gap year. I took a gap decade.

It began in 1995, when I was still an undergraduate and answered an ad for a part-time glassware washer at Affymax, a Silicon Valley biotech company. The scientists in the tissue culture facility took me under their wing and became my first real mentors. They taught me ELISAs and flow cytometry, and they trusted me to run a bioreactor that produced millions of dollars’ worth of antibody.

After I finished my degree, Affymax offered me a full-time position in its molecular pharmacology group. There I developed assays and helped pioneer miniaturized, multiplexed tests based on bioluminescence, the light living cells can produce. I would return to that technology years later at Stanford.

In 2001, when Affymax went through a major restructuring, I turned down the buyout and moved to ChemoCentryx, a company studying the chemical signals that direct immune cells through the body. A few months in, the CEO made me the only scientist reporting directly to him. My job was to step into projects across the company, figure out what was holding them back, and do the science to move them forward. He called me his “special forces team.”

It was an extraordinary time to be in biotech, working alongside scientists whose discoveries helped shape modern immunology. By the time I began my PhD at Stanford in 2003, I had spent years doing real science, and I’d learned that a longer road can also be a richer one.

At the Stanford Bench

In 2003, I began my PhD in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 

My research focused on immune cell therapies for cancer, especially cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cells, immune cells that can be grown in the lab and turned against tumors. I also studied how those cells could carry cancer-killing viruses directly to tumors. Using in vivo imaging, I could watch these therapies work inside living organisms, bringing my biotech work with bioluminescence full circle.

Because the immune system touches nearly every part of the body, my work as an immunologist reached well beyond cancer into infectious disease and many other areas of human health.

Along the way, I was drawn into the business side of science as well. I consulted for ChemoCentryx, spent six months as executive director of the Molecular Sciences Institute during its move from Berkeley to Milpitas, and briefly served as chief scientific officer of an immune cell therapy startup. Each role taught me something. 

My own path left me with a conviction I’ve never lost. Talent in science is everywhere; opportunity is not. Too many capable students never find their way in because no one shows them the door, especially girls, who are still too often given the message that science isn’t for them. I decided to be the person who opens that door for any student with the drive to walk through it.

Three Decades of Opening Doors

I’ve been opening doors for students for as long as I’ve been doing science.

It started when I was an undergraduate. My anatomy instructor asked if I would take notes for a classmate with dyslexia, and helping that student keep up showed me how much the right support can change what a student believes is possible. Soon I was tutoring at my college’s tutoring center, first in critical thinking and then in the sciences.

At Affymax, I looked for ways to get kids excited about science. For Bring Your Child to Work Day, I made a women-in-science video with the help of my uncle, a cinematographer, interviewing scientists across the company long before anyone could shoot video on a phone. I also volunteered with Expanding Your Horizons at San Jose State, bringing the Affymax tissue culture lab to middle school girls.

At Stanford, students became a regular part of my lab. I mentored high school and undergraduate students at the bench, many of whom have gone on to leading universities, medical schools, and graduate programs. I was a teaching assistant for Stanford’s cell and molecular immunology course, taught human immunity in Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies for five years, and taught in Stanford Continuing Studies for fifteen years, covering immunity, the gut microbiome, autoimmune disease, and menopause. I also served five years on the Pre-Collegiate Studies admissions committee, and today I interview applicants as a Stanford alumni volunteer. Both have given me a clear view of what makes a young scientist stand out.

After leaving the lab in 2016, my time was divided between teaching at Stanford and working with students one-on-one. Teaching adults who had already built their careers was rewarding, but what drew me most was mentoring young people directly, at the moment when an open door can change the course of their lives. So I chose to focus entirely on mentoring, and I gave that work a name: Bio:Logic.

Bio:Logic Today

Bio:Logic carries on the work I’ve been doing all along: getting young people excited about biology and showing them where it can take them.

At its heart is mentorship. I work one-on-one with high school students online, wherever they live, and many stay with me for two to four years. Some come for AP Biology, some to prepare for the USA Biology Olympiad, and some to design and carry out independent research of their own. Whatever brings them in, every student works directly with me, and that continuity is where mentorship does its best work.

Because opportunity shouldn’t depend on what a family can afford, I keep Bio:Logic’s doors open to the wider community, too. Our free USA Biology Olympiad Study Club meets online every week through the fall and winter, and free High School Biology tutoring sessions give any student a chance to experience learning science with a mentor.

My research students have placed at state science competitions and published in the Journal of Emerging Investigators. The work is theirs, and so are the author lines. I’m proud to be in the acknowledgments. Students I’ve mentored have gone on to MIT, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, among many other universities, and on to medical school, graduate school, and careers in science and medicine. Today, they include surgeons, CEOs, and biotech company founders.

In science, real mentorship often doesn’t begin until graduate school, if it begins at all. I believe it should start much earlier, in middle and high school, when students are still discovering who they can become. That’s the mission behind Bio:Logic. Looking ahead, I envision the Bio:Logic Bio:Sphere, a lab that gives students a rare opportunity to do hands-on research of their own.

Every student I work with reminds me why I started. Talent in science is everywhere. My job is to make sure opportunity finds it.