In his PhD in Molecular Biology, working with Ben Hankamer at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Dr. Maurizio Chioccioli led a large-scale, high-throughput analysis to develop next generation microalgae systems for commercial (biofuels) applications. This work ignited his passion for quantitative imaging of dynamical systems, which he then pursued in a short postdoc at University of Cambridge, UK in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics under Ray Goldstein. While there, Dr. Chioccioli invented a novel live video-microscopy platform and worked closely with mathematicians and physicists to study dynamic flagella beating and trajectory of single-cell C. reinhardtii. Turning to the biomedical field, in the lab of Pietro Cicuta at the Cavendish Laboratory at University of Cambridge, he applied these same modeling principles capture dynamic ciliary beating via high-speed video-microscopy. He co-invented new quantitative approaches to assess drug efficacy in Cystic Fibrosis patients and to characterize and potentially diagnose different variants of Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia. Dr. Chioccioli was recruited to Yale School of Medicine in 2018, where he is now Instructor under the mentorship of Naftali Kaminski in the Section for Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. His appointment has provided him the intellectual freedom and independence to pursue research interests in alveolar injury and regeneration and specifically the role of AT2 cells in these processes. In his most significant body of work to date, he led a study to define the dynamic spatiotemporal coordination of alveolar stem cells in response to injury and discovered motility of these cells as a new cellular mechanism through which the alveolar injury response is coordinated.

In this webinar, Dr. Chioccioli will:

  • Describe motility of alveolar stem cells as a new injury response mechanism in the lung and reveal properties of stem cell motility at high cellular resolution
  • Explain early highly dynamic behavior of AT2 cells post injury, including migration within and between alveoli
  • Characterize the emergence of at least three distinct morphokinetic AT2 cell states associated with AT2 stem cell injury response
  • Show how small molecule-based inhibition of Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) pathway significantly reduced motility of AT2 stem cells following injury and reduced expression of Krt8, a known marker of intermediate progenitor cells