Andreas Matouschek

Andreas Matouschek began serving in College of Natural Sciences leadership in 2020 and became Interim Dean in 2025. He served previously as Associate Dean for Research and Facilities, overseeing a team of 17 full-time staff, charged with supporting the research enterprise in the college, as well as the physical infrastructure needed to achieve excellence in research and education across more than 1 million net square feet of space in over 25 buildings on four campuses that span from the McDonald Observatory in West Texas to the Marine Science Institute on the Gulf Coast. He previously served as Director of the Center for Biomedical Research Support in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Endeavors at The University of Texas at Austin. Matouschek joined the Department of Molecular Biosciences at UT Austin in 2012 after spending the previous 15 years at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he also served as Program Leader for Cancer Cell Biology in the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Feinberg School of Medicine, directed an Interdepartmental Graduate Program in the Biological Sciences and served as Associate Dean for Student Affairs in the Graduate School. He was trained at the Biocenter of the University of Basel, Switzerland (EMBO Fellow, Biochemistry), the University of Cambridge, UK (Ph.D., Chemistry), and the University of Munich, Germany (Diplom, Biology). 
 

The Matouschek Lab studies mechanisms of protein machines, protein folding, unfolding, and degradation. The goal of the lab is to describe the biochemical mechanism of the Ubiquitin Proteasome System (UPS) in a physiologically relevant context. A deeper understanding of the UPS leads to the discovery of unexpected ways through which cellular processes are regulated. Lab members translate insights gained about this into strategies to interfere in the UPS experimentally and eventually therapeutically. As experimental methods, lab members use techniques including protein engineering, quantitative biochemical assays, cell biology, genome-scale screens and single molecule biophysics.