Birgitt Schuele
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Associate Professor (Research) of Pathology and, by courtesy, of Neurology and Neurological Sciences
Knight Initiative Funded Researchers, Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Affiliates
Birgitt Schüle, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, and by courtesy, Neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on medical genetics and stem cell modeling to uncover disease mechanisms and pathways involved in neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease and related disorders. She is dedicated to developing novel therapeutic strategies that contribute to the advancement of precision medicine.
Dr. Schüle obtained her medical training from the Georg-August University Göttingen and Medical University Lübeck, Germany, between 1993 and 2001. She earned her doctoral degree in medicine (Dr. med.) in neurophysiology from the Georg-August University Göttingen in 2001. During her neurology internship from 2001 to 2002 at the Medical University of Lübeck under the guidance of Prof. Christine Klein. Subsequently, she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in human genetics with Prof. Uta Francke at Stanford University School of Medicine from 2003 to 2005. From 2005 to 2019, Dr. Schüle demonstrated leadership in spearheading critical clinical research programs and establishing essential biospecimen repositories for neurogenetics, translational stem cell research, and brain donation at the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center.
Since joining Stanford in 2019, she has served as Associate Core Leader for Neuropathology and the Research and Education Component (REC) within the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). Her contributions to the ADRC include establishing a Stem Cell Program that supports a human induced pluripotent stem cell and post-mortem leptomeninges tissue bank. These resources are shared with repositories at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and others, facilitating collaborative research and advancing understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.
Her global health work focuses on improving equitable access to neurogenetic diagnosis and care for patients and families with spinocerebellar ataxia type 10 (SCA10) in Peru, Brazil, and Mexico. Through long-standing collaborations in Latin America, she has helped build a program that integrates patient recruitment, return of results, genetic counseling, and access to rare disease care networks, serving as a model for how genomics can expand access and strengthen care for patients with rare disease.
