Rate My Professor Alessio Ciulli

Professor Alessio Ciulli is the Chair of Chemical and Structural Biology in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, where he serves as Founder and Director of the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in Chemistry from the University of Florence in 2002, with a final year project in computational drug design and NMR spectroscopy of matrix zinc metalloproteases. Awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, he pursued his PhD at the University of Cambridge from 2002 to 2006 under the supervision of Chris Abell, in collaboration with Astex Pharmaceuticals, focusing on biophysical and structural studies of protein-ligand interactions and enzyme mechanisms. Post-PhD, he held a College Research Fellowship at Cambridge from 2006 to 2009, conducting research on biophysical fragment screening and fragment-based drug design within consortia funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Union. In 2009, he received a short Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship to collaborate with Craig Crews at Yale University on structure-based PROTAC design targeting von Hippel-Lindau. That year, he also started as a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow at Cambridge until 2013.

In 2013, Ciulli moved to the University of Dundee as Reader (Associate Professor) in Chemical and Structural Biology within the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, School of Life Sciences, and was promoted to full Professor in 2016. His research in chemical biology and structural biology centers on targeted protein degradation (TPD), developing PROTACs, molecular glues, and proximity-induced drug modalities to modulate protein-protein interactions for drug discovery. He is the scientific founder of Amphista Therapeutics, a spin-out from his Dundee lab. Highly cited works include 'Structural basis of PROTAC cooperative recognition for selective protein degradation' (Nature Chemical Biology, 2017), 'Selective small molecule induced degradation of the BET bromodomain protein BRD4' (Angewandte Chemie, 2015), 'BAF complex vulnerabilities in cancer demonstrated via structure-based PROTAC design' (Nature Chemical Biology, 2019), and 'Targeting the von Hippel-Lindau E3 ubiquitin ligase using small molecules' (Nature Chemical Biology, 2012). Major awards encompass Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, 2025), Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE, 2023), Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC, 2016), ERC Starting Grant (2012), Biochemical Society Industry and Academic Collaboration Award (2025), and Prous Institute Overton and Meyer Award (2022).