Francesco Cecconi    

Curriculum Vitae
Full Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Member of the AIRC Scientific Committee, Unit Head at the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark and member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
As a Max-Planck-Institute researcher (MPI of Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany) in the field of developmental cell death, he has described the function in vivo of Apaf1 (1997), a master regulator of mitochondria-dependent apoptosis. In 1999, he was awarded a Telethon Scientist position, and since then he is the Head of the Molecular Embryology Lab at the Department of Biology University of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. After his seminal work on the pro-autophagic molecule Ambra1 (2007), he became a world-leader in the field of autophagy, while producing in parallel key papers on the role played by apoptotic molecules in synaptic degeneration.
He is author of more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Cell, and Nature Cell Biology. In recent years, he has developed a strong expertise in molecular neurobiology to study the molecular mechanisms that underlie memory formation in mouse models of neurodegenerative disorders. Also, his team is dissecting the regulatory network of autophagy, a central player in cancer ontogenesis and progression.

Lab members
Francesco Cecconi (Full Professor) francesco.cecconi@uniroma2.it; fcecconi64@gmail.com
Sabrina Di Bartolomeo (Ricercatore TD) sabrina.dibartolomeo@uniroma2.it
Daniela De Zio (Ricercatore TD) daniela.de.zio@uniroma2.it
Paola Merlo(Postdoctoral Fellow) merlo.paola@me.com
Flavie Strappazzon (Postdoctoral Fellow) strappazzonflavie@hotmail.com
Francesca Nazio(Postdoctoral Fellow) francescanazio@yahoo.it
Cristina Valacca (Postdoctoral Fellow) valacca@gmail.com
Valentina Cianfanelli (Postdoctoral Fellow) vale.cianf@hotmail.it
Juliane Becher (Postdoctoral Fellow) juliane.becher@yahoo.de
Meysam Yazdankhah (Postdoctoral Fellow) meysam.yazdankhaha@yahoo.co.uk
Somayeh Poorpirali (PhD student) s_pirali@yahoo.com
Ashraf uz Zaman (PhD student) azaman.mb@gmail.com
Maria Cristina Capizzi (PhD student) mariacristina.capizzi@virgilio.it