Professor of Pharmacology

I have been Professor of Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology at the University of Pavia since 2020 (part-time until 2022).
I have been working in the field of signal transduction since 1987 and in molecular neuroscience since 1993. In
Heidelberg, as a postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), I learned techniques
in mouse genetics, successfully applying them to the neurobiology of learning and memory.
For the past 27 years as a PI (first at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, 1998-2015, and then as a professor
at Cardiff University, UK, 2015-2022), I have been investigating the role of synaptic signaling in behavioral plasticity
and neuropsychiatric disorders, developing viral vector-based technologies to manipulate
gene expression in vivo in the brain, and new pharmacological approaches based on cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) as
an effective tool for modulating protein-protein interactions.
The main objective of my laboratory is to investigate the cellular signaling mechanisms underlying behavioral dysfunction
and to test innovative therapeutic approaches, not only in human cellular models (iPSCs) and mouse models
of basal ganglia disorders (drug addiction, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease), but also in
neurodevelopmental disorders.
More recently, in Cardiff and then in Pavia, I conducted research aimed at
developing human iPSCs, biomarkers, and new therapies for 16p11.2 deletion and duplication CNVs, further expanding
my research interests toward translational neuroscience.
As a complementary approach, my laboratory is also repositioning clinically relevant drugs capable of
penetrating the brain, and these studies have recently led to the identification of an ERK pathway inhibitor, PD325901,
as a potential candidate for the treatment of ERK-dependent brain disorders.