Prof. Vincenzo Pirrotta Rutgers University, USA

Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1942, Prof. Pirrotta migrated with his family to Rome and then to the US. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, studying physical chemistry and molecular biology. He obtained his PhD with Matthew Meselson and Mark Ptashne and returned to... read moreEurope, moving progressively from Stockholm to Basel (Assistant Professor), to the new EMBL Laboratory in Heidelberg, studying gene regulation in bacteriophage lambda and then Drosophila molecular genetics. From Heidelberg, he moved to Houston, Texas, at the Baylor College of Medicine, studying developmental biology, gene regulation and chromatin organization. In 1992, when Prof. Pirrotta moved to the University of Geneva, he was researching the problems of chromatin silencing by the Polycomb proteins. He joined Rutgers University in the autumn of 2004 in pursuit of Polycomb silencing, chromatin complexes, genomics and nuclear architecture.