Dr, Birgitt Schüle, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on medical genetics and stem cell modeling to unlock disease mechanisms and pathways leading to neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease and related disorders, and to develop new therapeutic strategies to advance precision medicine.

She received her medical training from the Georg-August University Göttingen and Medical University Lübeck, Germany (1993 - 2001) and completed doctoral degree in medicine (Dr. med.) in neurophysiology at the Georg-August University Göttingen (2001). During her neurology internship from 2001 to 2002 at Medical University of Lübeck with Prof. Christine Klein, Dr. Schüle studied genes for inherited forms of Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. From 2003 to 2005, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in human genetics with Prof. Uta Francke at Stanford University School of Medicine. From 2005-2019, Dr. Schüle led key clinical research programs and biospecimen repositories for neurogenetics, translational stem cell and brain donation at the Parkinson’s Institute and Clinical Center.

Dr. Schüle is the associate core leader of the Neuropathology Core with the Stanford Alzheimer Research Center (ADRC) and core leader of the Analytics Core for the Pacific Udall Center. She supports the centers with genetic characterization, biobanking, and building a human induced pluripotent stem cell and post-mortem leptomeninges tissue bank shared with the data and tissue repositories at NIH.

The Schüle lab works on gene discovery and novel stem cell technologies to generate stem cell models from patients with Parkinson’s disease to understand the underlying causes of neurodegeneration and to develop biomarkers and new therapies for Parkinson’s disease.