The Pew Charitable Trusts announced today that Claudio Giraudo, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine based in the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is one of this year's twenty-two Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew scholarships provide flexible funding to early-career scientists researching the basis of perplexing health problems—including diabetes, autism, Parkinson’s disease, and cancer. The new scholars join a prestigious community of Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winners, and hundreds of other pioneers who earned Pew grants at the start of their careers.

Dr. Giraudo received his doctorate in cell biology and biochemistry in 2002 from the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. He conducted postdoctoral studies in cell biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 2003 and continued his training with Dr. James Rothman at Columbia University in 2004 and at Yale University in 2008. In 2012, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on granule secretion by immune cells.

The Giraudo lab researches intracellular membrane trafficking and calcium-regulated exocytosis in eukaryotic cells. Diseases such as diabetes, mood disorders, viral infections, and cancer are all linked to a defect in the way that cells secrete small particles enclosed in sac-like containers—called granules. With the Pew award, Dr. Giraudo aims to identify the protein machinery cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) use to secrete granules that break down cells.

Link to Department of Communications news announcement.