Professor Dan Fabris

Dan Fabris is Professor and the Harold S. Schwenk Sr. Distinguished Chair in Chemistry. He grew up in Italy, hiking in the Dolomites, playing rugby, and studying chemistry. He received his Ph.D. from University of Padova (Italy) and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Research Council in Padova and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. At the dawn of the field proteomics, he was involved in the development of novel approaches for protein analysis based on mass spectrometry (MS). As an independent investigator at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, his research focus shifted to the investigation of the structure- function relationships in RNA systems involved in infectious diseases. His group developed new MS approaches for the elucidation of RNA and protein-RNA complexes that were not directly amenable to X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). He investigated the ability of selected nucleic acid ligands to affect the structure and dynamics of the packaging signal of the genome of immunodeficiency virus type- 1 (HIV-1), which induced inhibition of essential chaperoning activities of the viral nucleocapsid protein. After moving to University at Albany to become one of the founding members of The RNA Institute, his research interests expanded to include the investigation of the effects of covalent RNA modifications of both endogenous and exogenous origin on the structure/dynamics of viral RNA. His group developed new strategies for epitranscriptomics analysis that enables the investigation of RNA post-transcriptional modification at a system level. At University of Connecticut since 2020, he is now capitalizing on these unique technologies to explore the role of the epitranscriptome in virus-host interactions and to identify new targets for the development of more effective antiviral therapies.