Over 5 years from 1967 to 1972, Schibler pursued the study of biology, biochemistry, and chemistry at the University of Bern, approximately seventy kilometers from his hometown of Olten.
Afterwards, he continued his education there, eventually receiving his PhD diploma with Latin Honors in 1975 for his work on ribosomal RNA in the context of vertebrate evolution.
[2] He then obtained a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and worked at the laboratory of Robert Perry, who was based at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia for two years.
[6] While at the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva, Schibler's research team unexpectedly came across DBP, a transcriptional regulatory protein whose expression was found to be robustly circadian in the liver.
[2] In a 1998 study, Schibler and his team published a paper providing strong evidence for the existence of circadian clocks in mammalian peripheral tissue.
In 2000, they conducted experiments on the effects of restricted feeding time on mice and observed that the phase of peripheral oscillators – but not that of the SCN – gradually adapted to imposed feeding-fasting rhythms within a week or two.
However, in the meantime they discovered additional pathways involved in the phase-resetting of peripheral clocks, such as signaling by glucocorticoid hormones,[12] body temperature,[13] and actin dynamics.
[14] In 2002, Schibler and his colleagues identified the nuclear orphan receptor REV-ERBα as the major regulator of expression of the circadian gene Bmal1 in both the SCN and peripheral tissues.