Professor Manuela Zaccolo (Professor of Cell Biology, Fellow and Tutor in Biomedical Sciences) has received three prestigious awards this year.
Recently she was awarded the 2023 Ketty Schwartz Award by the International Society for Heart Research European Section. This award is made annually to a European researcher who has made a significant scientific contribution to cardiovascular research.
Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, where she is Deputy Head, explains that ‘The award honours Professor Zaccolo’s contribution to unravelling the intricate dynamics of cyclic nucleotide signalling, with a particular focus on the cardiac myocyte. In particular, she developed the first genetically encoded fluorescent probes for cAMP detection in living cells, which provided direct evidence of nanodomain cAMP signalling and shed light on the crucial role of phosphodiesterases in cAMP compartmentalisation. Furthermore, the Zaccolo lab’s research has advanced our understanding of how second messengers achieve hormonal specificity through subcellular compartmentalization and nanodomain signalling, and in doing so has fundamentally changed the way we study intracellular signaling and how we target it for therapeutic purposes.’ She will deliver the award lecture titled ‘cAMP nanodomain signalling’ at the next ISHR-ES Annual meeting on Thursday 13 July 2023.
In May this year Professor Zaccolo was awarded Membership of Academia Europaea, a pan-European Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly enquiry. It has a membership of more than 5,000 world-leading researchers, including more than 80 Nobel laureates, and acts as co-ordinator of European interests in national research agencies. It confers membership to individuals who have demonstrated ‘sustained academic excellence’.
In April this year Professor Zaccolo was elected a Fellow of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, one of the most prestigious academies in Italy.