Interview with Professor Giampietro Schiavo

Giampietro Schiavo is a Professor of Cellular Neuroscience, Deputy Director for strategy at Queen Square Institute of Neurology, academic lead of the Alzheimer Research UK Drug Discovery Institute at University College London (UCL), and Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute, at UCL. He earned his degree at the University of Padua, Italy in 1992, studying Clostridium bacterial neurotoxins in human disease, which sparked a lifelong interest in fundamental neuronal cell biology. Since 1997, he has directed an independent lab, first at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute and later at UCL, focused on uncovering mechanisms underlying axonal transport and trafficking of pathological aggregate-prone proteins in neuronal health and neurodegenerative diseases. He joined the Editorial Board of Journal of Cell Science (JCS) in 2007 and recently stepped down after 18 years of providing his expertise and efforts to promote the field of neuronal cell biology. To recognise these invaluable contributions, we spoke with Giampietro over Zoom to reflect on his career, his unique view of the neuron as a model system in cell biology and what he enjoyed most about being a Handling Editor for JCS.