Meet the Director

MBHI Leadership

Taglialatela, Giulio, PhD

Giulio Taglialatela earned his MS in biological sciences in 1984 and his PhD in pharmacology in 1988, both at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy, followed by postdoctoral training in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (BMB) at UTMB in 1988-1990.

At UTMB in 1993 as a research assistant professor, Dr. Taglialatela rose through the ranks to his current appointment as a tenured professor and Vice Chair for research in the Department of Neurology where he was endowed as the Lawrence J. Del Papa Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research and serves as the director of the UTMB Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. Dr. Taglialatela’s research focuses on the molecular and cellular neurobiology of Alzheimer’s Disease and related disorders, with particular attention to synaptic (dys)function, brain resilience and therapeutic approaches to stimulate it. His research has been continually funded by NIH and other agencies for the past 27 years and is presently supported by three R01 grants from the National Institute of Aging/NIH.

Dr. Taglialatela is also actively involved in teaching medical and graduate school students. Notably, in January 2021, Dr. Taglialatela was appointed Dean ad interim of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, a service he completed in February 2022. He has directly mentored sixteen graduate students and five postdocs who have now reached independent positions in academia, industry and government. He served for several years as the Co-Director of the molecules, cells and tissues course, Associate Director and later the Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program, and the Director of the UTMB Neuroscience Summer Undergraduate Research Program while teaching the full human gross anatomy laboratory and several classes to both the medical and graduate school. In 2013 and 2023 he was awarded the Graduate Student Organization Distinguished Teaching award, the highest teaching recognition given each year to one graduate faculty, and the one of the two faculty at UTMB ever receiving this award twice.