Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lambert Schmithausen is a retired German professor of Buddhist Studies, born on the 17th of November 1939 in Cologne. He is known as one of the leading academics in the field, with major contributions to the study of Yogacara philosophy, Buddhist ethics, and the ethics of nature.
Schmithausen was an associate professor of Indology at the University of Münster from 1970 to 1973, then moved to the University of Hamburg where he taught until his retirement in 2005. He spent thirty-two years at Hamburg.
His two-volume work "Alayavijñana: On the Origin and Early Development of a Central Concept of Yogācāra Philosophy" published in Tokyo in 1987 by the International Institute for Buddhist Studies is considered a landmark study. It traces the origins of the storehouse consciousness concept within the Yogacara tradition.
Schmithausen published a full monograph titled "The Problem of the Sentience of Plants in Earliest Buddhism" in 1991 through the International Institute for Buddhist Studies in Tokyo. He also delivered the A.L. Basham Lecture for 1989 at the Australian National University in Canberra on the same subject, published as "Plants as Sentient Beings in Earliest Buddhism."
Schmithausen was elected a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1995, midway through his tenure at the University of Hamburg.
Schmithausen received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1963. His earliest published monograph, a study of Indian error theory related to Mandanamirsa's Vibhramavivekah, appeared through the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1965.