Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. He is the scientific founder of Amphista therapeutics, a biotech company spin-out of his Dundee laboratory that develops new protein degradation platforms. He is also the Founder and Director of Dundee’s new Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation, a new translational chemical biology center for innovating discoveries and next-generation therapeutics in the TPD field.

Research in his laboratory focuses on developing small molecules inducing protein degradation and targeting protein-protein interactions.

Alessio graduated Magna Cum Laude in Chemistry from the University of Florence in 2002. His final year Laurea project was in computational drug design and NMR spectroscopy of matrix zinc metalloproteases with the late Ivano Bertini at the Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM).

In 2002 he was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge. His PhD research, under the supervision of Chris Abell and in collaboration with Glyn Williams’s biophysics team at Astex Pharmaceuticals, concerned with biophysical and structural studies of protein-ligand interactions and enzyme mechanism.

In 2006 he was awarded a College Research Fellowship to conduct post-doctoral research on biophysical fragment screening and fragment-based drug design, within the framework of two international consortia to develop new drugs against tuberculosis funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Union FP6, jointly directed by Chris Abell and Tom Blundell. A short Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Fellowship allowed Alessio to visit Yale University in February 2009 and initiate collaboration with Craig Crews on structure-based design of small molecule inducers of intracellular protein degradation (PROTACs) targeting the von Hippel-Lindau protein (VHL). He returned to Cambridge in June 2009 to start his independent research career as a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow within the Department of Chemistry.

In 2013 Alessio was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and moved his laboratory to Dundee where he took up a Readership (Associate Professorship) in Chemical & Structural Biology as Principal Investigator within the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery of the School of Life Sciences. He was promoted to Professor (Chair) in October 2016.

Honours and Awards

• 2023 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• 2022 Prous Institute – Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery
• 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC)
• 2016 MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship
• 2016 RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award
• 2015 ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award
• 2015 EFMC Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia
• 2014 Talented Young Italians Award (Research and Innovation)
• 2012 ERC Starting Grant
• 2009 BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship