Giulio Srubek Tomassy

I was born in Rome, Italy, where I also got a Bachelor Degree and a PhD in Developmental and Cell Biology. After my PhD I moved first to Naples, where I worked at the Telethon Institute of Genetics of Medicine and then at the Univesity of Turin. In 2009 I move to Boston and joined the the Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology Department at Harvard University. It is here at Harvard that my interest about myelin and oligodendrocytes biology started. Last year I have made what I feel is a very important discovery for the advance of the neurosciences; the finding that contrary to current dogmas, neurons are not all myelinated in the same way: what you can read in any biology textboox or even find in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=myelin&source=lnms...), is that myelin is distributed evenly along the length of an axon, regardless the identity of the neuron to which that axon belongs. However, I demonstrated that different types of neurons are myelinated in different ways. This changes the way we think, as a field, about the role of myelin and suggests that different neurons may use myelin differently to achieve more complex behavior and to diversify their long-distance communication strategies. I am now interested in further studying where this heterogeneity of myelination profiles comes from and if oligodendrocytes also contribute to it. I am waiting to start my own lab, but in the meantime I would like to collect some pilot data as proof of principle that will help me set up my own lab.

December 2014