Markus Schmidt is founder and team leader of Biofaction, a research and science communication company in Vienna, Austria. With an educational background in electronic engineering, biology and environmental risk assessment he has carried out environmental risk assessment and safety and public perception studies in a number of science and technology fields such as GM-crops, gene therapy, nanotechnology, converging technologies, and synthetic biology.

He was/is coordinator/partner in several national and European projects, for example SYNBIOSAFE, the first European project on safety and ethics of synthetic biology (2007-2008), COSY on communicating synthetic biology (2008-2009), TARPOL on industrial and environmental applications of synthetic biology (2008-2010), CISYNBIO on the depiction of synthetic biology in movies (2009- 2012), a joint Sino-Austrian project on synthetic biology and risk assessment (2009-2012), or ST-FLOW on standardization for robust bioengineering of new-to-nature biological properties (2011-2015).

He produced science policy reports for the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (on GM-crops in China), and the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (nanotechnology and converging technologies). He served as an advisor to the European Group on Ethics (EGE) of the European Commission, the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the J Craig Venter Institute, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Bioethics Council of the German Parliament as well as to several thematically related international projects. He is the author of several peer-reviewed articles, edited a special issue and two books about synthetic biology and its societal ramifications, and produced two documentary films about synthetic biology.

In addition to the scientific work, he organized a Science Film Festival (Bio-fiction) and produced an art exhibition (synth-ethic, both 2011) to explore novel and creative ideas and interpretations on the future of biotechnology.