BIO
Dario Alessi is Director of the Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, a Medical Research Council unit in the School of Life Sciences at Dundee University, where he also heads the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy that is one of the UK’s flagship collaborations between academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies. His current research is focused on understanding how disruptions in signal transduction pathways contribute to cancer, hypertension and neurodegenerative disorders. Abnormal protein phosphorylation and ubiquitylation is a cause or consequence of many such diseases, while defects in genes that encode protein kinases and phosphatases as well as components of the ubiquitylation system underlie a number of inherited disorders. Professor Alessi is a Fellow of the Royal Society, which awarded him its Francis Crick Prize Lectureship, and of the Academy of Medical Sciences. His multiple distinctions include the Gold Medal of the European Molecular Biology Organization.