Marta Filizola, PhD

Dr. Filizola is the Sharon & Frederick A. Klingenstein-Nathan G. Kase, MD Professor and the Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is a dedicated leader in computational biophysics of membrane proteins with over 20 years of experience in the application of methods of computational and theoretical chemistry to biochemical and biomedical problems, as well as to rational drug design. A native of Italy, Dr. Filizola received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Chemistry from the University Federico II in Naples. She earned her PhD in Computational Chemistry from the Second University of Naples, though conducting most of her doctoral studies at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. She went on to earn a postdoctorate in Computational Biophysics from the Molecular Research Institute in California. Dr. Filizola’s research program is mainly focused on G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs), which are the targets for about half of all currently used drugs. Special effort in her lab has been devoted to the subfamily of opioid receptors to discover/design novel painkillers with reduced abuse liability and other adverse effects. A second important line of investigation in the Filizola lab is on beta3 integrins towards the discovery of novel therapeutics to treat renal, hematologic, neoplastic, bone, and/or fibrotic diseases. For more information, please visit the Filizola Laboratory website.

Dr. Filizola’s computational methodologies are closely intertwined with collaborative experimental investigations to provide new and biologically relevant insights into signal transduction processes triggered by molecular recognition, giving rise to new hypotheses to guide further experimental inquiry. Dr. Filizola is the author of several patents and over 100 publications in the field of computational biophysics. She is currently a tenured Full Professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences, and the Department of Neuroscience. She was appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Sinai in 2016.