ERC: Ildikò Szabo

Prof. Szabo received M.Sc. in biology and chemistry at the University Eotvos Lorand in Budapest and Ph.D at the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Padova. Following an EMBO long-term fellowship at the University of Tuebingen, she became researcher at the Department of Biology at UniPD in 1998. She has been selected as EMBO Young Investigator in 2002 and elected as EMBO Member in 2023 and was the Coordinator of the Ph.D. school in Biosciences at the University of Padova (from 2017 to 2023). In 2022 she was elected as Co-Chair of the Bioenergetics, Mitochondria & Metabolism Subgroup of the American Biophysical Society (2022-2024). In 2015 and 2017 she co-chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Organellar Channels and Transporters. Prof. Szabo participates in several national and international evaluation panels. She carried out her studies thanks to prestigious national and international grants as PI/coordinator (e.g. World Wide Cancer Research, Human Frontiers Science Program grant, Michael J Fox Foundation grant, AIRC, Association for Multiple Sclerosis, Telethon). Her interest focuses on the molecular identification and functional characterization of nucleus-encoded ion channels in bioenergetic organelles, exploiting a combination of molecular and cell biology with biophysics and bioenergetics studies. Currently, her group is working on pharmacological and genetic targeting of different mitochondrial ion channels in the context of cancer, autoimmune diseases and on mitochondrial diseases.