Maria Lucia Pigazzini is currently a doctoral candidate jointly at the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology and at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, in Berlin, Germany. She received her BSc in Biochemistry from King´s College London and her MSc in Neuroscience from University College London, UK. Lucia now works in the group of Prof. Janine Kirstein on proteostasis in aging and disease, in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Cell Biology. Her research focuses on understanding the aggregation properties and kinetics of the disease-causing protein huntingtin. She further investigates the relationship between huntingtin and a set of molecular chaperones, both in vitro and in the C. elegans model organism. Lucia is enthusiastic about contributing knowledge on the toxic mechanism of the huntingtin protein, in the hope that it can promote translational research towards a treatment for Huntington´s disease.
