Fernanda Langellotto is a developmental and molecular biology researcher. She got her master degree in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Naples, Italy, in 2005. The focus of her master degree thesis was on the understanding of the role of the glial derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) in the central nervous system of the adult zebrafish.
In 2006, Fernanda started her PhD in the lab of Dr Paolo Sordino in the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy. She focused on gene regulation in zebrafish and the analysis of a novel gene family, Soul proteins, a recently discovered heme binding protein family. During her PhD, Fernanda was awarded with an EMBO fellowship and in 2009, she joined Professor Alan J. Davidson lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, USA, as visiting researcher and as a part of a collaboration with her PhD advisor. This collaboration arose from Fernanda’s observation that Soul2 is expressed in the zebrafish kidney (Davidson focus of research). During her time in Davidson’s lab she was able to show that Soul2 bound to a number of proteins involved in energy metabolism (Krebs cycle and glycolysis), ribosomal RNA expression, and proliferation, suggesting that this proteins may function in cells with a high metabolic and proliferative potential.
After Fernanda got her PhD title, she started to focus onto the gene therapy and human disease field and she came upon an advertisement for an open post-doc position at the UMass Medical School, Worcester, USA in the Department of Ophthalmology and Gene Therapy Center. She joined the lab of Dr Claudio Punzo at the UMass Medical School in 2010. She focused on the understanding of the role of mTOR pathway in photoreceptors during retinal degeneration.
On July 2012 Fernanda joined Dr Roberto Chiarle’s Lab at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, USA in the Department of Pathology where she currently takes care of all the managerial aspects of the lab and is involved in a collaboration project between Dr Chiarle and Dr Feng Zhang at MIT to exploit the innovative technique of TALEs to study various aspects of chromosomal translocations.