Fabio Benfenati - Biography#

The main subjects of investigation of Dr Benfenati have been the molecular mechanisms of information transfer among neurons and the application of new technologies to modulate neural activity in health and disease. He started working at the Karolinska Institutet in Fuxe’s and Hokfelt’s laboratories that pioneered the field of neurotransmission in the central nervous system Thereafter he joined Paul Greengard’s laboratory at the Rockefeller University in 1986 Since then, he has addressed the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neural and synaptic communication using a variety of experimental models of human diseases by using a combination of advanced experimental techniques. The double background of neurologist and cellular neurophysiologist allowed him to get in depth into the cellular mechanisms that underlie normal brain function and whose dysfunction leads to the pathogenesis of neurological diseases.

In 2006 he started the big challenge to build the Department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies at the newborn Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova with the mission to approach interdisciplinary research in Neuroscience by interacting with the Nanotech laboratories developed within the same Institute. The research program regarded the exploitation of the mechanisms of neural plasticity by generating innovative neuroelectronic and opto-neural interfaces to pioneer new solution for neuroprosthetics. Starting from 2015, he is Director of the IIT Center of Synaptic Neuroscience and Technology (NSYN) that IIT developed together with the IRCCS University Hospital San Martino and the University of Genova Medical School with the aim of boosting the application of new technologies to central nervous system diseases. His current research group in NSYN consists of 40 people working in state-of-art equipped laboratories. He is author of over 390 research papers in peer-reviewed international journals, including: Science (1), Nature (2), Neuron (2), Nature Materials (1), Nature Photonics (1), Nature Nanotechnology (1), Nature Communications (5), Nature Neuroscience (1), J Cell Biology (5), J Clin Invest (2), EMBO J (3), Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (12), Cell Journals (1 Cell Stem Cell, 3 Cell Reports), Brain (3), and co-inventor of 8 patents. SCOPUS: h-index = 67; publications 391; citations 16700.