Dario Alessi is the Director of MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit at the University of Dundee. He is an international leader in the field of cell signalling by kinases. He discovered and characterised the PDK1 protein kinase that phosphorylates and activates the Akt protein kinase, which plays vital roles in insulin and growth factor pathways. Dario is now using expertise accumulated in analysing other signal transduction pathways to study of regulation and function of signal transduction components that are mutated in inherited Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.