Christian Schlieker, PhD

Christian Schlieker is an expert in dissecting cellular etiology of movement disorders, with a focus on nuclear compartmentalization and liquid-liquid phase separation. After undergraduate studies at the University of Bonn/Germany and the University of New South Wales in Sydney/Australia, Dr. Schlieker performed his PhD in Bernd Bukau’s laboratory at the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg, Germany. Here, he employed biochemical and biophysical tools to define the mechanism of Clp/HSP100 AAA+ ATPases in counteracting proteotoxic protein accumulation. He then joined the laboratory of Hidde Ploegh at Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute/MIT, where he worked on the ubiquitin/proteasome system and identified a novel role for a Ubiquitin-related modifier in RNA modification.

Dr. Schlieker joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 2009, where he currently is Professor and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Schlieker received several awards including an NIH Director New Innovator award. He served on the scientific advisory board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation and numerous national and international review panels, including NIH (NCSD), DOD (Clinical Trial Neurological Disorders review panel) and the European Research council, amongst others. At Yale, Dr. Schlieker served as chair of the committee of majors for Yale College, and is presently co-director of the Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics and Structural Biology graduate program and a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery.