Dr. Tino Pleiner was born in the small town Zeitz near Leipzig in East Germany. Dr. Pleiner is a First Generation college graduate. He studied biochemistry and molecular biology in Leipzig and Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Pleiner holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he did his lab work at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences with Dirk Görlich. He then escaped the rainy weather in Göttingen to do a postdoc with Rebecca Voorhees at Caltech in sunny Pasadena, California. 

The Pleiner lab combines mechanistic cell biology, structural biochemistry and protein engineering to dissect the pathways and molecular machines that mature human membrane proteins to a fully functional state. We also develop alpaca-derived and synthetic nanobodies as tools to modulate intracellular pathways that globally regulate protein homeostasis in health and disease.