Prof Robert Schneider

Institute of Functional Epigenetics, Helmholtz Center, Germany

After obtaining a PhD at LMU Munich on the organisation of DNA in E. coli Robert Schneider joined the lab of Tony Kouzarides, Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, UK as PostDoc to study eukaryotic chromatin. There he got fascinated by histone methylation and how this modification regulates transcription. From Cambridge he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Freiburg to start his own group, broadening his interest towards novel sites and types of histone modifications and their role in chromatin dynamics and epigenetic reprogramming. In 2012 he was recruited as “Directeur de Recherche” to the IGBMC, Strasbourg where his team studied how core and linker histone H1 modifications mechanistically regulate chromatin function in healthy and diseased cells. Since 2016 he is head of the Institute of Functional Epigenetics at the Helmholtz Center Munich (HMGU) and Professor at the Faculty of Biology of the LMU Munich. The current focus of his team is on the mechanistic function of histone modifications and their links with cellular metabolism, epigenetic memory in single cells as well as RNA modifications.