Massimo Locati

Massimo graduated from the Medical School of the University of Milan and earned a specialization degree in Toxicology from the same University. From 1993 to 1996, he worked at the Laboratory of Immunology of the “Mario Negri” Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, participating in research projects aimed at defining the signal transduction pathways of chemokine receptors in leukocyte recruitment. He then moved to the Laboratory of Host Defenses of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA) where he participated in various studies identifying chemokine receptors as crucial players in the entry of HIV-1 into target cells. In 1998, he returned to Italy as tenured researcher at the University of Brescia, then, in 2001, he moved to the University of Milan. In this period his main research focus was represented by the regulation of the inflammatory response. Since 2013, he has been Full Professor of General Pathology and Immunology at the University of Milan, where he currently holds the position of Director of the Department of Medical Biotechnology and Translational Medicine. Since 2007, he is also the Director of the Leukocyte Biology Laboratory at the IRCCS Humanitas Clinical Institute in Rozzano. Between 2009 and 2014, he was Scientific Secretary of the Italian Society of Immunology, Clinical Immunology, and Allergology (SIICA), of which he currently holds the position of Vice-President. His most recent research interests concern the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms involved in the polarized activation of macrophages and the role of macrophages in chronic inflammatory diseases and tumors. In these research fields, he published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, with an overall IF greater than 1,300, over 35,000 citations, and an H-index of 74. Stimulated by ambitious and challenging projects, he has always been intrigued by the biological aspects of medicine. With Hemera he is now strongly motivated to transfer the knowledge acquired over years of research into an innovative therapeutic approach.

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