Dr. Fernández-Chacón received his MD from the University of Seville, Spain in 1990 and his PhD in cell physiology and biophysics from the same university, where he was supervised by Guillermo Alvarez de Toledo, in 1995. During his PhD, he studied the release of neurotransmitters (chemical messengers). As a post-doctoral investigator, he studied the molecular mechanisms of vesicle (storage packets) function and calcium-mediated neurotransmitter release in the laboratory of Thomas C. Südhof at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX, and at the laboratory of Christian Rosenmund at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the EMBO Young Investigator Award (2001) and the European Neuroscience Institute Network (ENINET) Young Investigator award (2004). He is currently an investigator at IBIS and CIBERNED, and his lab studies the function of the synaptic vesicle co-chaperone Cysteine String Protein-alpha and the molecular mechanisms underlying the functional and structural maintenance of synaptic terminals (sites of communication).
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