Dr. Mennella received his B.Sc. cum laude from the University La Sapienza in Rome. After receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to continue his studies in the US, he obtained his MSc and PhD in Physiology and Biophysics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he discovered the cellular mechanism of microtubule depolymerization mediated by Kinesin-13s and studied the mechanism of their regulation.
From there, Dr. Mennella joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute lab of Dr. David Agard at the University of California San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow, where he trained in super-resolution microscopy and advanced imaging methods for studying organelle cell biology.
In 2014, Dr. Mennella became an Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry Department at University of Toronto, where he applied advanced imaging methods for increasing sensitivity of diagnosis of lung disease motile ciliopathy Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) and for characterizing novel protein assemblies.
In 2019, Dr. Mennella became Associate Professor at the University of Southampton where he led a collaborative team to discover a new isoform of ACE-2, the receptor of Sars-Cov-2 in airway epithelial cells and detailed the discovery of a new type of ciliary organelle that changed the current view of airway multiciliated cell organization.
In March 2021 Dr Mennella became honorary Associate Professor in the department of Genetics and Genome Biology at UCL and in June 2021 he became MRC investigator, Director of Research at the MRC toxicology Unit at University of Cambridge.
In this seminar, we will explore how the combination of nanometre-scale imaging modalities (Volume EM, super-resolution imaging), with AI segmentation algorithms, and Omics analysis in single cells of human lung tissue, is providing a novel perspective on airway biology and creating opportunities for translational medicine research. Our primary focus will be on the respiratory epithelium, a critical tissue that safeguards our lungs by serving as the first line of defence against bacteria, viruses, and particulate matter. We will provide examples illustrating how this multimodal spatial biology approach is revealing the molecular mechanisms underlying the protection of the airway from pathogens.