Schlichting pursued post-doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and at Brandeis University in Boston in the United States as a Feodor Lynen Fellow.
From 1994 to 2001 she was head of a working group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund.
Since 2002 she is director of the department for Biomolecular Mechanisms at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.
Schlichting has studied the structure and operation of biomolecules using protein crystallography.
[1] Recently, Schlichting has been one of the founders of time-resolved protein crystallography at Free-electron lasers.