Alexander Francis Palazzo was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. As a graduate student in Gregg Gundersen’s laboratory at Columbia University, he discovered two major pathways that regulate cell polarity in migrating fibroblasts. After receiving his PhD in 2003, he moved to Tom Rapoport’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School where he was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow. There he investigated how newly synthesized mRNA is exported from the nucleus and then targeted to specific sites in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells, such as the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum. In 2009 he started his lab in the Biochemistry Department.

Besides his work on mRNA export and localization, Dr. Palazzo is interested in how biological information is extracted from the mammalian genome. He has published several well regarded reviews on how mRNA processing and nuclear export is used to sort useful information from a genome that is mostly filled with junk DNA.

Dr. Palazzo has received several awards and is an editorial board member of the journal PLoS One.