Gianni Castiglione, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences

I grew up in Canada, with a Chinese mother and Italian father, both of whom are immigrants. I earned my B.S. (Philosophy, Mol. Cell. Biol) and Ph.D. degrees (Cell Systems Biol.) from the University of Toronto. I was a postdoctoral fellow in Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and University, School of Medicine. Our research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, harnessing evolution to understand human disease. Our mission is to design novel therapeutics by reverse engineering that which nature has already created. We interrogate the biochemical basis of blindness, cancer, and aging by investigating how the underlying protein networks evolved within extremophile animals. These include birds, horses, and deep-sea fishes, which are adapted to the extremes of light, oxygen, and metabolic activity. We use comparative genomics to identify mutations unique to these remarkable organisms, followed by experimental investigations of protein biochemistry, cell biology, and tissue homeostasis. These include UV-visible light spectroscopic analyses of dim-light visual pigments, retinal histology of knock-in mice containing visual pigments from bats, and the metabolomics of muscle progenitor cells isolated from the quadriceps of thoroughbred racehorses. I am committed to the success and intellectual freedom of my students and believe strongly that the best ideas come from bringing different perspectives together.