Marc Schumacher, Ph.D.

Dr. Schumacher was born and raised in the Chicago metropolitan area. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry from Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois in 1986.

After his undergraduate work, Dr. Schumacher continued his studies in Chemistry at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He was inspired to study Biochemistry after a summer of research at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen. He left Germany to enroll in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in the laboratory of Thomas Schmidhauser, Ph.D.  In 1995 he successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Studies on the regulation of expression of a carotenoid biosynthetic gene, al-1 of Neurospora crassa”.

As a postdoc, Dr. Schumacher characterized a novel osmotic sensory protein of Neurospora crassa in the laboratory of Claude P. Selitrennikoff, Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, Colorado.  Then he joined the laboratory of Dennis R. Voelker, Ph.D. at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, Colorado, where he identified a gene involved in the transport of phosphatidylserine to mitochondria in Saccharomyces cerevisiae in 2002.  After this, Dr. Schumacher undertook an industry position as a technical specialist at Invitrogen Corporation in Carlsbad, California.

In 2008, he returned to academic pursuits and joined the laboratory of the late Richard G. W. Anderson, Ph.D. to study mammalian lipid droplet biogenesis at UT Southwestern. After the passing of Dr. Anderson, Dr. Schumacher joined the laboratory of Russell Debose-Boyd, Ph.D. at UT Southwestern, where he revealed the long-time elusive target of geranylgeraniol in the degradation of the cholesterol/isoprenoid biosynthetic enzyme, HMG CoA Reductase.