Gregory Wayne Schmidt

Gregory Schmidt, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia, died peacefully at home on November 18, with a view of his beloved native azaleas and the birds he so avidly watched in his retirement.

Dr. Schmidt was an intellectual explorer and creative thinker, known for his cross-disciplinary research, his ceaseless intellectual curiosity, and his unorthodox creativity. Across his scientific career his laboratory was awarded millions of dollars in research funding and published around 100 research papers. His experimental methods were noted for their creative approaches to complex problems, and his restless creativity found other outlets: as a poet, photographer, storyteller, and gifted improvisational pianist. Before moving to UGA he was part of the downtown New York experimental arts scene, and his photographs appear in a recently published volume on the performance art of this period.

Over his 35 years at UGA he led pioneering work in understanding photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight into chemical energy. Despite being the key to almost all life on earth, photosynthetic processes, functions, and regulation are still not fully understood. In his early career, his laboratory developed methods for taking these systems apart and reassembling them so they could be studied in vitro. His results were so innovative that they were initially questioned before being validated, opening doors for other researchers to follow. More recently, he contributed to interdisciplinary work on the symbiotic relationship between reef-forming corals and algae, revealing the breakdown of algae as the primary cause of the mass coral reef bleaching events that have become ever more prominent as global ocean temperatures rise.

As those familiar with him knew well, there were no simple answers for him, and he was just as happy to lecture his golf buddies or his family members around the dinner table as his students in the classroom. He understood that to really answer a question meant you needed to look at the intricacies of how things work, the detailed pathways and connections, as well as the big picture.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Wayne and Lucille, and is survived by his wife, Brigitte Bruns, his sons Theron, Tobias, and Nicholas, and his sisters Roberta (Tigges) and Jody (Kimball).

Always in pursuit of the unattainable, his lifelong work will live on in the questions that linger in the minds of his students, his friends and colleagues, and his children.

In lieu of flowers, we invite donations in his memory to Doctors Without Borders or to the Hospice Services of St. Mary’s Foundation .