Lars Plate, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Lars grew up in northern Germany and first moved to the USA to earn his BS in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He conducted research in the group of JoAnne Stubbe where he investigated the subunit interactions of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase. For his doctoral work, Lars studied bacterial nitric oxide gas sensing proteins and signal transduction pathways with Michael Marletta at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology with emphasis in Chemical Biology in 2013. He then joined the groups of Jeff Kelly and Luke Wiseman at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA for his postdoctoral training, where he used chemical biology and proteomics approaches to investigate endoplasmic reticulum (ER) proteostasis pathways and protein quality control mechanisms. He defined how these processes can be targeted therapeutically to treat diverse protein misfolding and aggregation diseases using newly identified small molecule ER proteostasis regulators. Lars joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2017.