Simon Alberti

Simon Alberti is among the early pioneers studying phase separation and its applications in aging and neurodegenerative disease. He is Professor and Chair of Cellular Biochemistry at the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC), Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering (CMCB), Technical University Dresden, Germany. From 2005 to 2010 he was a postdoc in the lab of Susan Lindquist, an expert in neurodegeneration, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he worked on prions and amyloids. In 2010 he initiated his career as an independent scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, where he was a Research Group Leader until 2018.

Simon studies proteostasis and the molecular principles underlying cytoplasmic organization. His recent work shows that stressed cells form many bimolecular condensates via a biophysical process known as phase separation. Importantly, the ability to form compartments becomes detrimental with increasing age, because compartment-forming proteins have a tendency to misfold and aggregate and thus are closely tied to the pathogenesis associated with age-related diseases such as ALS. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 in Cell Biology from the University of Bonn, Germany.