Andrea Ballabio

After graduating in medicine and specialising in paediatrics at the "Federico II" University of Naples, he spent many years first in England and then in the United States, where he became an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Baylor Human Genome Center in Houston, Texas. In 1994 he returned to Italy to found TIGEM, of which he is Scientific Director; TIGEM is a centre of excellence of Italian research, where about 220 researchers from all over the world work. Together with his team of researchers he has identified gene mutations underlying many rare genetic diseases. His discovery of the TFEB gene, which controls the functioning of lysosomes, has had a great impact in the field of cell biology and in that of neurodegenerative diseases.