Nadinath Nillegoda is an Independent Group Leader at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He completed his BA in Zoology at Ohio Wesleyan University, Ohio, USA and his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine of New York University (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai), New York, USA. After completing his postdoctoral studies as a Humboldt Fellow (from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany) at the Center for Molecular Biology, Heidelberg University, he worked as a Project Leader at the German Cancer Research Center.
Nadinath's scientific interests range from studying cellular repair mechanisms that help maintain protein homeostasis to neurodegenerative diseases. His research focuses on the mammalian Hsp70 and J-domain protein family of chaperones that act as guardians of cellular proteomes. His work combines biochemistry, cell biology and animal models of disease to understand how potentially cytotoxic protein aggregates are solubilized (disaggregated) and cleared in human cells and how this activity modulates the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases that cause dementia. His research opens the possibility to reverse, rather than prevent protein aggregation, therefore, is an attractive new direction for future therapeutic interventions for a broad range of protein conformational disorders that have limited or no cures.
