Dirk Schübeler is a Senior Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland. He received a Ph.D. from the Technical University in Braunschweig, Germany and is an adjunct Professor of the University of Basel.

Dirk Schübeler’s research focuses on understanding how chromatin states are generated and how they contribute to the regulation of transcription and replication, using both drosophila and mammalian systems. His goal is to derive and test regulatory models to implement epigenetic regulation into current models of transcriptional control in health and disease.

His group has pioneered approaches to measure DNA methylation, histone modifications and DNA replication at the level of the genome and to combine these with functional assays. The group has identified recruitment mechanism for readers and writers of DNA methylation towards a better understanding of the information flow that generates and reads a chromatinized genome. In more recent work his group is defining how transcription factors respond and modify chromatin.

Prof. Schübeler was involved in the Swiss Systems Biology Project (SysX) and in two European epigenome networks (EpiGeneSys and BLUEPRINT) and he serves on several advisory and editorial boards. He is a member of EMBO and has received several awards, including the Friedrich Miescher Prize of the Swiss Society for Biochemistry.