Team
Meet the team behind this cutting-edge research.
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Our Team
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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. |
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Faria Zafar, MS is a Life Science Research Professional III in the Schuele lab with more than five years of experience in patient- derived human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Her passion for science and research escalated by understanding that research with stem cells can be a valuable guide to explore diseases like Parkinson’s in vitro. She has broad tissue culture experience in iPSCs, neuronal differentiation, MEA, Immunofluorescence, q-PCR, CRISPR and mouse in-vivo surgery.
She received her Master of Science (M.S.) in Stem Cell Biology from San Jose State University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley with a major in cell & developmental biology. |
Alejandra Torres, MS
Life Science Research Professional II |
Alejandra ('Ale') Torres, MS is a Life Science Research Professional II and earned her Masters in Biochemical Sciences from UNAM Mexico. She is currently working on optimizing a neural dopaminergic differentiation protocol of iPSC lines, as well as studying the immunofluorescence of such cells and conducting biochemical assays of iPSCs.
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Kamilla Sedov earned her Master of Biotechnology degree at San José State University. She was an intern and CIRM scholar at the Schuele Lab before joining as a Life Science Research Professional II.
Kamilla believes that using iPSCs has the potential to uncover both the underlying mechanisms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and prospective therapeutic strategies. She is working on optimizing microglia and co-culturing differentiation protocols of iPSCs that would allow to create immune profiles of diseased and healthy states for future biomarker and drug discovery assays. She also works on characterizing iPSC lines using Optical Genome Mapping and generating CRISPRi/a cell lines for disease modeling of Parkinson’s and related diseases. |
Ethan Bautista, MS
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Ethan Bautista, MS is a Life Science Research Professional I and earned his Master of Biotechnology degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His previous experience spans cancer biology, immunology, and chemical quality control. Ethan is interested in how iPSCs can be leveraged to better understand complex disease mechanisms.
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Sara Oviedo, BS is a CIRM Bridges intern from San José State University pursuing a master’s degree in Biological Sciences - focus in Stem Cell Biology. She received a BS in Genetics and Genomics from the University of California, Davis, while participating in regenerative medicine research at the California National Primate Research Center as a CIRM COMPASS scholar. She is passionate about advancing stem cell-derived disease models and is currently working on the SCA10 project to generate patient hiPSC-derived SCA10 models to explore the relation between motif architecture and ATXN10 disease expression.
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Manchos
Collaboration Liaison |
Manchos is a good boy and is always happy to meet new people. Manchos is such an important asset to the Schuele lab because he attracts people from all throughout Stanford. He supports interdisciplinary collaborations in the lab because of his great smile and charming cuddles. Manchos is specialized in food tasting and receiving hugs.
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