Elisbetta Morini

Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Speaker

Elisabetta Morini, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research centers on the regulation of mRNA splicing and how its disruption contributes to neurological disease, with the goal of developing RNA-targeted therapeutics. She earned her Ph.D. in Molecular and Regenerative Medicine from the University of Modena, conducting part of her doctoral research as a visiting graduate student at UMass Medical School, where she studied the molecular pathogenesis of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD). She later joined the Center for Genomic Medicine at MGH in the lab of Dr. Susan Slaugenhaupt, where she developed mouse models of Familial Dysautonomia and advanced splicing modulator therapies for the disease. Now leading her own lab, Dr. Morini focuses on developing therapeutic strategies to correct splicing defects in a range of neurological disorders. Her most recent work explores the role of neuron-specific poison exons in the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases and leverages RNA-based approaches to prevent neuronal degeneration.