Luciana Dente

She is full Professor of Molecular Biology and Council President of five Master courses at the University of Pisa. She has more than thirty years of experience in Genetic Engineering technologies, with special emphasis on the study of gene expression. Her research activity started at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) in the years of the emerging field of recombinant-DNA. She contributed to the construction of large collections of cloning and expression vectors with her pioneering work on pEMBL single stranded phagemids. Later, she was Staff Scientist at the University of Naples and at the University of Rome –Tor Vergata, identifying and studying factors involved in the regulation of tissue-specific gene expression. At the same time, she designed and developed innovative “Phage Display” technologies for the study of protein-protein interactions. Since 1999 she is Professor at the University of Pisa, supervising molecular studies on nervous system development and disease, by exploiting Xenopus laevis and zebrafish as model systems.