Esteban Dell'Angelica, PhD
Professor and Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Human Genetics
About
Esteban Dell’Angelica is a Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Human Genetics. He serves as the Director of Scientific Foundations of Medicine, a component of the medical curriculum in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He got his PhD degree at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) for his isolation and biochemical characterization of a hitherto unknown calcium-binding protein from neutrophils. During his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Juan S. Bonifacino, PhD, at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland), he identified and characterized several components of the molecular machinery for protein trafficking within the so-called ‘late secretory’ and ‘endocytic’ intracellular pathways, and he described the first example of human disease due to mutations in a known component of such molecular machinery (Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome type 2). As a faculty member at UCLA, he identified and characterized three multi-subunit protein complexes, named BLOC-1 through -3, which are required for the biogenesis of lysosome-related organelles such as melanosomes and platelet dense granules. He is an active member of a multidisciplinary team at UCLA that collaborates with other teams of the nation-wide Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) to tackle very rare and poorly understood human diseases.
The goal of his research is to understand the molecular pathogenesis of monogenic disorders, in particular those affecting intracellular protein trafficking and organelle biogenesis. He is committed to excellence in education and mentoring, and is the recipient of a number of teaching awards, most recently the 2020 Kaiser-Permanente Award for Excellence in Teaching.