Luciano A. Marraffini

Luciano Marraffini is a microbiologist that pioneered the study of CRISPR-Cas immunity in prokaryotes. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Rosario in Argentina in 1998 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2007, studying bacterial pathogenesis in the laboratory of Dr. Olaf Schneewind. He was a postdoc at Northwestern University from 2008 to 2010 with Dr. Erik Sontheimer, where he determined that that CRISPR-Cas systems target DNA molecules in a sequence-specific manner, a study that was key to understand the mechanisms of CRISPR immunity at the molecular level and for the developing of gene editing technologies. In 2010 he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University. Since 2018, Luciano has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.