Rebecca Schüle
Rebecca Schüle, M.D., is an Adult Neurologist and Neuroscientist with special expertise in neurodegenerative motoneuron diseases and movement disorders. She serves as the Director of the Division of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Heidelberg University Hospital and is Full Professor at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg in Germany. As a clinician-researcher the objective of her research is to advance novel treatments and cures for rare and ultrarare hereditary movement disorders.
Dr. Schüle received her M.D. from Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg, Germany. After graduating, she trained in Neurology and Movement disorders at the University of Tübingen under the guidance of Prof. Thomas Gasser. As a Marie-Curie-Fellow of the European Union, she intensified her research into genomics of rare movement disorders in the group of Prof. Stephan Zuchner at the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics in Miami, Florida. Upon her return to the University of Tübingen, Dr. Schüle served as Residency Program Director and Clinical Practice Director at the Center for Neurology and, as senior faculty, took over the lead of the research group ‘Functional Genomics of Rare Movement Disorders’ at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research.
Over the last decade, Dr. Schüle has built a translational research program for ultrarare diseases with a particular focus on the group of Hereditary Spastic Paraplegias (HSP) and Ataxias. This includes the TreatHSP Registry and Biobank, an international natural history registry for HSPs. In leading international networks on HSPs and ataxias such as TreatHSP, PROSPAX and the European Reference Network for Rare Neurological Diseases she has developed patient-focused progression and treatment response outcomes for HSPs such as the Spastic Paraplegia Rating Scale. Her group has further made major contributions to the field by discovering multiple novel disease genes and uncovering novel disease pathways for HSPs. In recent years she has pioneered development and application of tailored RNA therapies for ultrarare diseases as a founding member of the 1 Mutation 1 Medicine network. Dr. Schüle has published > 180 peer-reviewed publications; her work is funded by the European Union, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ (DFG) and many others.