Alberto Luini - Biography#

Alberto Luini graduated in Medicine at the University of Milan and spent a post-doctoral training period at the Weizmann Institute (Israel) and a period as a scientist at the National Institute of Health, Bethesda (US) (under the supervision of the Nobel laureate J. Axelrod). In 1987 he decided to go back to Italy where he was one of the founders of the Consorzio Mario Negri Sud (Santa Maria Imbaro). There, he served as Group-Leader and then Head of the Department of Cell Biology and Oncology until 2009, when he moved to Naples. In Naples he is a Research Director at the Institute of Protein Biochemistry of the National Research Council and a Principal Investigator at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine.

His scientific interests are in the fields of membrane trafficking, signal transduction and bioimaging. His laboratory has made major contributions to our understanding of the organization of membrane trafficking in vivo, by developing imaging technology, methods, cellular systems, criteria and concepts that are currently used by scientists operating in the field. He developed correlative video-electron microscopy for cell biology, a technique now adopted by many laboratories and promoted by the European infrastructure EuroBioimaging; proposed, and provided evidence for, a novel general a transport principle called compartment maturation-progression; demonstrated a novel ubiquitous class of large pleiomorphic class of transport vesicles and analyzed the underlying molecular mechanisms; showed that ‘constitutive’ transport pathways are endowed with cell-autonomous homeostatic signaling circuits and regulated by membrane receptors; and is now developing applications of these finding to transport-related diseases (see the full CV for relevant references). He became EMBO member in 2004.

Alberto Luini endeavors to contribute to the scientific community by participating in top-level evaluation panels and in the activity of major european organizations and science infrastructures, as described in section 4.2.