Dr. Nicola Montaldo is a goal-oriented young investigator whose long-term research objectives include developing a thorough understanding of gene expression programs driven by DNA repair and their functions in human disease. After studying at the University of Cagliari in Italy, he was awarded several scholarships that allowed him to work in laboratories in US and France, where he developed his passion for DNA repair mechanisms, particularly base excision repair (BER). During his PhD at the University of Zurich, he proposed and elucidated the concept of BER-mediated transcription (published in Nature Communications in 2019). As a postdoctoral fellow in Trondheim, Norway, he first-authored a paper on the discovery of new transcriptional factors involved in DNA-damage response (published in Nucleic Acids Research in 2021). He is currently leading a team to establish a human model of Parkinson's disease (PD) to assess the relevance of his findings on BER-mediated transcription in PD progression.