Tino Pleiner
Dr. Tino Pleiner is an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, where he is also a member of Bio-X, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Göttingen, where he developed alpaca-derived nanobodies as precision tools for structural and cellular biology, earning the German government's Animal Welfare Research Prize for his innovative work. Following his graduate studies, Dr. Pleiner conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, where he contributed to the first structure of the endoplasmic reticulum membrane protein complex (EMC) and discovered a regulatory role for the kinase WNK1 in EMC assembly. His lab focuses on the pathways and molecular machines that regulate protein homeostasis, particularly in membrane proteins, and develops nanobodies to study and address failures in protein homeostasis under disease conditions. As a First Generation college graduate, Dr. Pleiner is dedicated to mentoring other First Generation students through Stanford's First Generation Mentorship program.
Education
- PhD, Georg-August-University Göttingen (Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences), Molecular Biology (2016)
- M.Sc., Georg-August-University Göttingen (Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences), Molecular Biology (2012)
- B.Sc., University of Leipzig, Biochemistry (2010)