Luca Battistini was born in Genova, Italy, in 1964. After obtaining his Medical Degree in 1989, he completed the Residency in Neurology in 1994. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was then appointed as Research Associate at the Biochemistry Department, E.K. Shriver Center (Waltham, MA, USA) where he directed the Neuroimmunology Lab and in 1996 as Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. After returning to Italy, he established the Neuroimmunology Lab at the European Centre for Brain Research at the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, also setting up a Flow Cytometry Facility with advanced instrumentation.

From the beginning of his scientific career, he has obtained significant grants from private national and international Foundations, and the Italian Ministries of Health and Education and Research. Specifically, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society USA (NMSS) and the Italian Foundation for MS (FISM) have sustained Luca Battistini’s research for the past 25 years. In 2002, FISM assigned him the Rita Levi Montalcini prize for “Best Young Researcher” for his studies on the role of T lymphocytes in multiple sclerosis.

He is member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Foundation for MS; he was a founder of the Italian Society for Neuroimmunology (AINI) and of the Italian Society of Clinical and Experimental Cytometry and member of the Scientific Board of AINI from 2004 to 2007. Since 2016 he is also member of the Scientific Board of the International Society for NeuroImmunology (ISNI).

He has published over 100 papers on peer-reviewed journals (H index 50) and has served as a reviewer for several funding agencies and international journals. He obtained in 2014 the National Academic Qualification as Full Professor in Neurology and Applied Biology from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR). On January 2^nd, 2018, he was appointed Vice-Scientific Director of the Santa Lucia Foundation Scientific Institute.

<— Sandra Amor      Burkhard Becher —>