Jutta Schmiers-Heller holds a Masters Degree in Foreign Language Pedagogy (University of Münster, Germany, 1996) and has been teaching at Columbia University since 2002. She came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1996 and taught German at Oberlin Collge as well as serving as Director of Max Kade German House (1996-1998). Before joining the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia, she taught ESL, French, and German at Montclair State University and also pursued graduate studies in Applied Linguistics (1998-2002).

At Columbia, Jutta Schmiers-Heller teaches classes at the beginning and intermediate levels and her research interests are in the areas of second language acquisition, foreign language methodology, computer assisted language learning and materials development.