Luciano Marraffini

Marraffini was born and raised in Rosario, Argentina. He had two passions growing up: following his hometown soccer team Club Atlético Newell's Old Boys, and reading about science.[2] Marraffini attended the Escuela Dante Alighieri high school and then entered the Facultad de Ciencias Bioquimicas y Farmaceuticas at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario to pursue a degree in Biotechnology. As an undergraduate he studied the biochemistry of plant ferredoxin-NADP⁺ reductases under the guidance of Dr. Eduardo Ceccarelli.[3] Marraffini moved to Chicago for his doctoral studies. He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago investigating the biochemistry and biological role of sortase, a transpeptidase that links surface proteins to the envelope of Gram-positive bacteria, in the laboratory of Dr. Olaf Schneewind.[4][5][6]

In 2008, Marraffini joined the laboratory of Dr. Erik Sontheimer at Northwestern University as a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research Fellow. In the Sontheimer lab, Marraffini pioneered the study the molecular mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas systems. Using bacterial genetics, he determined that CRISPR-Cas immunity uses sequence-specific DNA destruction to neutralize invaders.[7] This study was key to understand the mechanisms of CRISPR immunity at the molecular level and also predicted the existence of RNA-programmable Cas nucleases and their current applications to gene editing.

In 2010, Marraffini joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University to continue studying CRISPR-Cas immunity.[8] In 2012, he initiated a collaboration with Dr. Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard that culminated in the development of the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 technologies to edit the genomes of bacteria and human cells.[9][10] Currently, research in the Marraffini Lab focuses on the elucidation of the mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas immunity in bacteria.[11]

For work in his own laboratory, he was honored with the Searle Scholars award in 2011,[12] the NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2012,[13] the Hans Sigrist Prize from the University of Bern in 2015,[14] the Earl and Thressa Stadtman Scholar Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (jointly with Georgios Skiniotis) in 2016[15] and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award[16] and the Albany Medical Center Prize (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, Francisco M. Mojica and Feng Zhang) in 2017.[17]

He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2017 and Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.[18][19] Marraffini was appointed investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in 2018[20]