Ottavio Arancio received his Ph.D and M.D. from the University of Pisa (Italy). From 1981 to 1986, he took residency training in Neurology at the University of Verona (Italy). Dr. Arancio has held Faculty appointments at Columbia University, NYU School of Medicine, and SUNY HSCB. In 2004, he became a Faculty member of the Dept of Pathology and Cell Biology and The Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University. Dr. Arancio is currently running the laboratory in Neurophysiology and Behavior at the Taub Institute. Dr. Arancio is a cellular neurobiologist who has contributed to characterizing the mechanisms of learning in both normal conditions and during neurodegenerative diseases. During the last ten years, he has pioneered the mechanisms of synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease. More recently, he has established a shockwave exposure mouse model for the study of traumatic brain injury. Dr. Arancio’s laboratory has focused primarily on events triggered by oligomeric proteins including amyloid-beta and tau. These studies have suggested new links between synaptic dysfunction and dementia, both for understanding the etiopathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury and for developing therapies aiming to improve cognitive symptoms.
Luana Fioriti received a Laurea in Scienze Biologiche from the
Università degli Studi di Milano in 2001, where she was trained in
Molecular Biology. She received a Specialization in Biotechnology
from the same university in 2004 and a PhD in Pharmacology from the
Open University in 2006. During her PhD, she worked on molecular and
cellular aspects of Familial Prion Disease, like Creutzfeld–Jacob's
Disease and Gerstmann–Straussler–Scheinker's Syndrome, in an attempt to
clarify the crucial steps for the appearance of these fatal
pathologies and possibly identify a cure. For her postdoc, she moved
to the USA, to Columbia University in New York, to the laboratory of
Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel. During her postdoc, she identified a
functional prion in the brain, i.e., a protein that plays a positive role
in neuronal functions when it is in an "aggregate" state. Moreover, she discovered that SUMOylation of CPEB3 prevents it from becoming pathological. In 2015, she was awarded the Telethon Career Award, which
allowed her to return to Italy in 2016 to lead a group of researchers
at the Mario Negri Pharmacological Research Institute in Milan. Dr.
Fioriti’s studies focus on the role of post-translational
modifications, especially SUMOylation, in the context of phase
separation, aggregation, and intercellular propagation of
aggregation-prone proteins under physiological and pathological
conditions.
