Rosario Rizzuto

Professor

Rosario Rizzuto is Professor of General Pathology and Chairman of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Padua. From 2015 to 2021 he was the Rector of the University of Padua. He is currently the President of the National Center for Gene Therapy and RNA-based Drugs, funded by the Italian Recovery Plan with €320,036,606.03. and grouping researchers from 47 public and private research centers.
Prof. Rizzuto's research activity has been focused on the study of cellular signaling pathways, and in particular of intracellular calcium ion homeostasis in physiological and pathological conditions. Early in his career, he developed an innovative method to induce the expression of luminescent (aequorin, luciferase) or fluorescent (GFP) proteins in cell organelles. This technique made it possible for the first time to quantitatively assess the concentration of calcium ions in specific organelles (endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus), demonstrating, for example, the role of mitochondrial calcium signals in apoptosis, the role of the Golgi apparatus as agonist-sensitive store and to estimate the calcium concentration in the ER and in the subplasmalemmal cytosolic rim. A seminal contribution was the demonstration of the calcium microdomains occurring in the contact sites between the ER and the mitochondria, the first demonstration of privileged signalling interactions between intracellular organelles (Science 1998, >1900 citations). More recently, he identified the protein channels responsible for mitochondrial Ca2+ and K+ fluxes. By bioinformatic screening of a database of mitochondrial gene products and in vitro and in vivo validation, a 40 kD protein was identified as the mitochondrial Ca2+ channel, the Mitochondrial Calcium Uniporter, MCU). This discovery (Nature 2011, >1500 citations) was followed by the identification of the accessory components of the MCU, and of the ATP-sensitive mitochondrial K+ channel (mitoKATP), proposed as the primary regulator of ischemic pre-conditioning (Nature 2019). Overall, Prof. Rizzuto authored more than 340 publications in international journals listed by Pubmed (58,000 citations; h-index 112, from Scopus).
Prof. Rizzuto received multiple awards, including the Chiara D'Onofrio Prize, the Biotec Award, the Theodor Bucher Medal and in 2014 the Antonio Feltrinelli Award from the Accademia dei Lincei. Prof. Rizzuto gave >300 invited talks at international conferences and seminars at research institutions. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, of Accademia dei Lincei and of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He acts as reviewer for funding agencies (BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, UMDF, etc.) and top international journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). His research activity was funded through the years by National and International agencies, such as the European Research Council (Ideas Advanced "Mitocalcium" project), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC), Telethon, the Ministries of Education and Health and the Cariparo and Cariplo Foundations.