Ana Maria Cuervo

Cuervo has made multiple seminal discoveries to the field of autophagy and role of failure of this process to aging and human disease. Cuervo was first to introduce the ideas of chaperone-mediated autophagy, that lysosomal degradation can be selective, and that cytosolic proteins can directly cross the lysosomal membrane. She characterized the molecular basis for the autophagic failure in aging and in different forms of Parkinson's disease, tauophathies and Huntington's disease, revealing disease-specific defects in different steps of the autophagic process: that failure of proteostasis is a factor in aging and age-related diseases but autophagy can be modulated to extend health-span.