Luca Scorrano

Biography and research

Scorrano obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Padua Medical School in 1996 and 2001 respectively. Later on, he moved to Boston where he worked with Stanley J. Korsmeyer at Harvard Medical School. He was hired by the Dulbecco-Telethon Institute in 2003 as an Assistant Scientist; there he studied mitochondrial morphology and proteins. His laboratory investigates the role of mitochondrial morphology and ultrastructure in cell life, death and differentiation. His lab discovered that Optic atrophy 1 mutates in the main one and behaves differently when it comes to crista and apoptosis. They also discovered that calcineurin regulates mitochondrial morphology and this process is important in Huntington's disease neuronal cell death . Further they discovered that mitofusin 2 is a tethering link between mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum.

Awards

Scorrano was awarded the Eppendorf European Young Investigator Award in 2006 and next year became a European Molecular Biology Organization elected member. In 2007 he was promoted to senior scientist at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and the same year became a full-time professor at the Geneva Medical School. In 2009 he became an editor of several well-known scientific journals in which he published his works, which are over 140 with an h-index of 42.