Professor Alexei Verkhratsky, PhD, D.Sc, Member of Academia Europaea (2003), Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2013), Member of Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia of Spain (2012), member of The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives (2012), was born in 1961 in Stanislaw, Galicia, Western Ukraine. Alexei graduated from Kiev Medical Institute in 1983, and received PhD (1986) and D.Sc. (1993) in Physiology from Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology also in Kiev. In the period between 1989 and 1995 he was visitor scientist in Heidelberg and Gottingen, and between 1995 and 1999 he was a Research Scientist at Max Delbrück Centre of Molecular Medicine in Berlin. He joined the Division of Neuroscience, School of Biological Sciences in Manchester in September 1999, became a Professor of Neurophysiology in 2002 and served as Head of the said Division from 2002 to 2004. From 2007 to 2010 he was appointed as a visitor professor/Head of Department of Cellular and Molecular Neurophysiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Academy of Sciences of Check Republic. Alexei also serves as a Research Professor of the Ikerbasque (Basque Research Council) in Bilbao, where, from 2012, he acts as Adjunct Scientific Director of the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience; from 2011 he is as a Honorary Visitor Professor at Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. Alexei is the editor-in- chief of Cell Calcium, Receiving Editor of Cell Death & Disease and member of editorial boards of many journals including Pflugers Archiv, Acta Physiologica, Glia, Purinergic Signalling,
Alexei Verkhratsky is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of cellular neurophysiology. His research is concentrated on the mechanisms of inter- and intracellular signalling in the CNS, being especially focused on two main types of neural cells, on neurones and neuroglia. He made important contributions to understanding the
chemical and electrical transmission in reciprocal neuronal-glial communications and on the role of intracellular Ca 2+ signals in the integrative processes in the nervous system. Many of Alexei’s studies are dedicated to investigations of cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration. A. Verkhratsky was the first to perform intracellular Ca 2+ recordings in old neurones in isolation and in situ, which provided direct experimental support for “Ca 2+ hypothesis of neuronal ageing”. In recent years he studies glial ageing and gliopathology in age-related brain diseases, including Alzheimer disease as well as in neuropsychiatric diseases. He authored a pioneering hypothesis of astroglial atrophy as a general mechanism of cognitive brain disorders including neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases.