Dr Luca Fusi

Luca Fusi obtained a PhD in Physiology from the University of Florence (Italy), during which he investigated the structure-function relation of the molecular motor of skeletal muscle in situ, combining sarcomere mechanics and small-angle X-ray diffraction in single muscle fibres. He joined King’s in March 2010 as a post-doctoral fellow. In 2014 he was awarded a King’s Prize Fellowship to study a novel form of regulation of contractility in skeletal muscle based on the myosin filament. In 2018 he was awarded a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (Wellcome Trust/Royal Society) to develop his laboratory at the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics. During his Fellowship he extended the study of thick filament-based regulation to cardiac muscle and he contributed to develop a novel paradigm of regulation of contractility in striated muscle.

In 2023 he was appointed as Lecturer in Muscle Physiology at the Centre for Human and Applied Physiological Sciences in the School of Basic and Medical Biosciences. His laboratory uses a combination of mechanical and structural methods, such as small-angle X-ray diffraction and fluorescence polarisation microscopy, to study the molecular mechanisms that control force generation in striated muscle at cellular and subcellular level.

Current areas of interest include thin and thick filament-based regulation of contraction in human cardiac and skeletal muscle, the molecular basis of length-dependent activation in cardiac muscle, and alteration of these mechanisms in ageing and diseases.