Vice Scientific Director, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia. Head of the Neuroimmunology Unit, European Centre for Brain Research, IRRCS Fondazione Santa Lucia Rome | Italy
Luca Battistini was born in Genova, Italy, in 1964. After obtaining his Medical Degree in 1989 at the University of Siena, he specialized in Neurology in 1994 in Rome (“La Sapienza” University). He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (NY, USA) and was then appointed as Instructor of Neurology (Junior Faculty) at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA) where he directed the Neuroimmunology Lab at the Shriver Center. After returning to Italy in 1997, he established the Neuroimmunology Lab at the European Centre for Brain Research at the Santa Lucia Foundation, also setting up a Flow Cytometry Facility with advanced instrumentation. Since June 2018 Dr. Battistini was appointed as Vice-Scientific Director of the Santa Lucia Foundation Scientific Institute, the biggest Research Hospital in Italy monothematic specialized in Neuroscience, with 325 beds, 61 research laboratories and more than 300 scientists.
From the beginning of his scientific career, he has obtained significant grants from private national and international Foundations, and from the Italian Ministries of Health and of 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 30 years. In 2002, FISM assigned him the Rita Levi Montalcini prize for “Best Young Researcher” for his studies on the role of CD8+ 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. From 2016 to 2018 he was also member of the Scientific Board of the International Society for NeuroImmunology (ISNI). Since 2022 he is member of the European School of NeuroImmunology (ESNI).
He has published over 170 papers on peer reviewed journals (Scopus H index 63), and has served as a reviewer for several funding agencies and international journals. Since 2001 he has a Contract as Professor of Immunology in the Integrated Course of General Pathology and Pathophysiology in the University Nursing Degree Program, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. He also obtained in 2014 the National Academic Qualification as Full Professor in Neurology (Italian Ministry of Research MIUR).
