Biography:

Dr. Mennella received his B.Sc. cum laude from the University La Sapienza in Rome, Italy. After receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to continue his studies in the US, he obtained his MSc and PhD in Physiology and Biophysics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where he discovered the cellular mechanism of microtubule depolymerization mediated by Kinesin-13s and studied the mechanism of their regulation (Mennella et al, Nature Cell Biology, 2005; Science Editors’ Choice, 2005; Journal of Cell Biology, 2008).

From there, Dr. Mennella joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute laboratory of Dr. David Agard at the University of California San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow, where he pioneered application of super-resolution microscopy and advanced imaging methods in organelle cell biology, in particular for analysing centrosome and cilia function. At UCSF, Dr. Mennella was first to describe the architecture of the Pericentriolar Material of centrosomes, debunking a long-standing assumption of its solely amorphous nature (Mennella et al, Nature Cell Biology, 2012; Nature Cell Biology News and Views 2012; Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology Highlights 2012; Trends in Cell Biology, 2014, 2015)

In 2014, Dr. Mennella became an Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry Department at University of Toronto, where he applied advanced imaging methods for translational medicine research increasing sensitivity of diagnosis of rare lung disease motile ciliopathy Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) and for characterizing novel cellular organelles structures (Sydor et al. Elife, 2018, Liu et al, Science Translational Medicine, 2020, Featured on magazine cover).

In 2019, Dr. Mennella became Associate Professor in the National Research Health Center and Biomedical Research center at U. of Southampton where he published the discovery of a novel type of cilium in the airways (Nguyen et al. Developmental Cell, 2020 and Liu et al. Developmental Cell, 2020) and led a collaborative team to discover a new isoform of ACE-2, the receptor of SARS-CoV-2 in airway epithelial cells published in Nature Medicine.

In 2021, Dr. Mennella became Director of Research at the MRC Toxicology Unit where he will focus on analyzing the effect of exposure to environmental pollutants and drugs on the airways. Dr. Mennella has received external funding from UKRI-BBSRC, Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), National Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada and new investigator awards from CIHR Institute of Human Development and Child Health, the ATS-PCD foundation, AAIR and other charities.

Research Interests:

The main aim of the research program is to understand how airways cells respond, adapt and survive when confronted with different types of insults such as toxic particulates, drugs targeting the airways and infectious agents.

The emergence of global health threats, such as COVID-19, has dramatically emphasized the role that the airways play in protecting our health throughout the life course. In addition to infectious diseases, the most recent systematic analysis of the global burden of disease, which includes data from more than 200 nations, has shown that the largest increase in risk of disease results from airway exposure to pollution from ambient particulate matter (PM). It is therefore of the outmost importance that we investigate the molecular mechanisms driving induction and progression of toxicity in the airways in order to identify biomarkers of disease and rescue strategies.

Toward this goal we employ airway primary cellular models from lung compartments to understand how different molecular insults affect pathways linked to airway defence. Our plan is to develop an airway-specific toolbox combining unbiased high-throughput assays and mechanistic studies to systematically identify key molecular events, common or different, in the adverse outcome pathways driven by potential toxicants. We employ a range of molecular tools including CRISPR-Cas9 loss of function studies, proximity mapping protein-protein interaction analysis and advanced imaging technologies such as super-resolution microscopy and volumetric EM to provide both a global and detailed view of airway cellular phenotypes.

Our knowledge and tools will be shared with the scientific community and industry partners for use in analysis of toxicity and adverse outcome pathways of novel compounds used in the clinic or introduced in the environment, such inhaled drugs and their delivery systems, new materials or environmental pollutants.