Elisabetta Morini, Ph.D.


Assistant Investigator
Center for Genomic Medicine, Mass General Research Institute
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Harvard Medical School
Phd visiting student University of Massachusetts Medical School 2012
M.S. University of Modena 2008
B.S. University of Modena 2005
NIH T32 training (Human Genetics) Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston 2016
alternative splicing; familial dysautonomia; genetics; neurodegenerative diseases; rna splicing; small molecules; therapeutics; transcriptomics

Elisabetta Morini is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on understanding the regulation of mRNA splicing and how its disruption leads to neurological diseases, with the ultimate goal of developing new therapeutics. During her doctoral studies, she investigated the pathogenic mechanism underlying facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) in the laboratory of Dr. Rossella Tupler at the University of Modena and, as visiting graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Green at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. After receiving her Ph.D. in Molecular and Regenerative Medicine, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Susan Slaugenhaupt in the Center for Genomic Medicine at MGH, where she worked on the generation and characterization of new mouse models for Familial Dysautonomia and the development of a splicing modulator therapy for FD. Since becoming a junior faculty at MGH and HMS, she has been working on developing novel therapeutic strategies to target splicing alterations across a variety of neurological disorders. Most recently, she became interested in understanding the role of neuron-specific poison exons in the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders and developing an RNA-targeted approach to preventing neuronal degeneration in frontotemporal dementia.