Francesco Fornai MD, PhD

Francesco Fornai is currently a Full Professor and Chair of Human Anatomy at the University of Pisa. As a second appointment, He is a Team Leader in the Neurobiology of Movement Disorders at IRCCS Neuromed. He has expertise in neurodegenerative conditions as witnessed by over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He had been trained at the University of Pisa, Italy, and Georgetown University, Washington (D.C.) with brief stages at the University of Washington, Seattle (WA) and Max Plank Institute Gottingen. At the University of Pisa, he completed his MD course. and he received a PhD degree in Medical sciences at SSSUP S.Anna. He worked as Post Doctoral Fellow while finishing his residency in Clinical Pharmacology. He served/serve as a Board member in a variety of peer-reviewed journals (Editor-in-Chief for Anatomia, Associate Editor for the European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neural Transmission, Frontiers in neuroanatomy, and others). His studies demonstrated for the first time an alteration of the autophagy machinery in motor neuron disease and provided innovative methods to explore the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration. In his research studies, we identified new brain disorders such as GAMT deficiency and we provided a cure for this rare disease in human patients. He developed novel experimental models to reproduce and comprehend Parkinson's Disease and, in collaboration with the Nobel Prize Dr. Thomas Sudhof, we demonstrated the detrimental effects of the synaptic protein alpha-synuclein in Parkinsonism.