Luigi Terracciano is the new rector of Humanitas University

Internationality, development of Artificial Intelligence and new technologies in Life Sciences for training doctors, nurses and physiotherapists. The University has strengthened its mission. Luigi Maria Terracciano has taken over from Prof. Marco Montorsi and has been appointed Rector of Humanitas University.

After his long international experience carried out mainly at the University Hospital of Basel (Switzerland), Prof. Terracciano joined Humanitas where he became Director of the School of Specialisation in Pathological Anatomy and the Rector’s Delegate for Internationalisation, besides teaching Pathological Anatomy. Teaching and research activities have always gone hand in hand with his clinical work in the hospital, where Prof. Terracciano is in charge of the Operative Unit of Pathological Anatomy.

As an expert in new technologies, Professor Terracciano is involved in the development of modern tissue analysis systems using organoids, Artificial Intelligence and Next Generation Sequencing, for increasingly personalised treatment, especially in the field of oncology.

Curriculum vitae di Luigi Terracciano

Luigi Terracciano is Director of the School of Specialisation in Pathological Anatomy at Humanitas University and Head of the Operating Unit of Pathological Anatomy at IRCCS Istituto Clinico Humanitas.

Until August 2020, he was Head of the Division of Molecular Pathology and Extraordinary Professor of Experimental Pathology at the Institute of Medical Genetics and Pathology at the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland. After his medical degree, followed by a specialisation in Pathological Anatomy at the University ‘Federico II’ in Naples, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Physiology in Heidelberg, Germany.

Since 1998, Prof. Terracciano has been a member of the International Liver Study Group, which has among its members some of the world’s most renowned liver pathologists. In 2016, he received the Dora Seif Award for his contribution to liver cancer research.

His research has consistently focused on gastrointestinal and liver non-neoplastic and neoplastic diseases. More specifically, Prof. Terracciano has 30 years of experience in molecular pathology, translational research and bio-repositories of neoplasms, as well as in “high-throughput” techniques such as the tissue microarray, a morphological analysis technique developed in his laboratory.

He has authored several publications on the identification of prognostic and predictive biomarkers in various gastrointestinal and hepatic neoplastic diseases. His Molecular Pathology division in Basel performed numerous annual next-generation sequencing (NGS) analyses of various neoplasms of patients at the University Hospital of Basel and at other hospitals in Switzerland.  In 2017, this work enabled the Molecular Pathology Division to be recognised as a ´Next Generation Sequencing Centre of Excellence’ in a strategic cooperation agreement with Thermo Fisher.