Roberta Peruzzo

Roberta studied Molecular Biology at the University of Padova (Italy), where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s Degree in 2013 and 2015 respectively.

After a year as a postgraduate researcher in which she delved into mitochondrial studies, Roberta pursued a Ph.D. in Biosciences at the University of Padova and obtained her degree in 2020. Working in Prof Ildikò Szabò’s laboratory, she investigated how mitochondrial ion homeostasis impacts cell viability and how its modulation via pharmacological tools can be used to treat neurological and metabolic diseases. Her discovery was patented in 2021.

In 2021, Roberta was awarded the AIRC (Italian Association for Cancer Research) Fellowship and joined Prof Roberto Zoncu’s laboratory at the University of California Berkeley for her postdoctoral studies. Here, she applied her expertise to a different organelle, the lysosome, and shifted her research emphasis on neurodegenerative diseases driven by lysosomal dysfunction. Specifically, Roberta is combining different approaches to determine how the master regulator, mTORC1 kinase, regulates autophagy, a lysosome-dependent pathway defective in multiple neurodegenerative diseases. Moreover, she is developing innovative chemical biology approaches to enhance the ability of autophagy and lysosomes to degrade neurotoxic protein aggregates.

Roberta is author of 26 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.