Heike Schmitz

Engineer, Foodie, Global soul, Investor, Parent, Philanthropist, Photographer, Project manager, Scientist

Heike Schmitz is a Research Associate/Program Manager/Software Engineer working on marine research instrumentation, with a focus on Marine Phytoplankton. She also is an angel investor interested in entrepreneurial opportunities in the marine space and involved in philanthropy supporting local and global environmental and community related organizations. In the early years of her career, Heike worked as a management consultant, analyst, and programmer for several Swiss companies. After moving to the US and taking some family time off, she first gained experience in Silicon Valley as a quality assurance engineer with a small startup. Heike was subsequently hired into the Google engineering team, where she eventually developed and led their first testing services teams, an organization of then over 300 people. As senior engineering manager, she was involved in the preparations for the IPO, including preparation for Sarbanes–Oxley compliance. Heike is a citizen of the United States and of Germany with a special place on her heart for Switzerland, the land she grew up in. Here she studied Computer Science at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Additionally, in 2014, she graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in Marine Biology.

The Ocean. Marine Conservation. Traveling. Motorbiking. Sailing. Music. Theater. And making the world a better place for everyone.

The mesopelagic - an ocean layer a few hundred meters below the surface - is thought to drive the carbon pump, a natural mechanism that draws atmospheric carbon dioxide into the sea, converts it into organic carbons and sequesters them to the deep. This role in dampening the increase of the potent greenhouse gas makes the mesopelagic one of the most important ocean layers and recent attention on this area as the next frontier for global fisheries is worrisome. We should first sufficiently study the mesopelagic, one of the least understood places on earth, and carefully plan any disruption of this ocean layer to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Angelinvesting, Management, Marine Biology, Software Engineering, Startups

Making Feuerzangenbowle.