[4][13] During his PhD, he worked with Jerard Hurwitz at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

His certificate of election reads: Frank Uhlmann's discovery with Nasmyth of 'separase', the protease that cleaves the cohesive links between sister chromatids to trigger anaphase is a key contribution to our understanding of the cell cycle.

He has made major contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms of sister chromatid cohesion, and their relationship to cell cycle regulation.

He generated the first chromosome-wide high resolution maps of proteins involved in chromosome packaging and segregation.

He has identified genes required for cohesion establishment, and shown that one of these, EcoI, acetylates cohesin during DNA replication, thereby locking it onto DNA and his studies of the link between cohesion regulation and the cell cycle have shown that as well as cleaving cohesin, separase promotes mitotic exit by activating the Cdc14 phosphatase in a protease-independent manner.