Jason A. Howitt, PhD

Associate Professor Jason Howitt is Head of the Cell Signaling Laboratory at Swinburne University, and an honorary fellow at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. He obtained his PhD in Biochemistry in 2002 and performed postdoctoral training at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and at Imperial College, London. He returned to Australia in 2006 as a NHMRC Howard Florey Fellow and has been continually funded since then by five further NHMRC project grants (four as CIA). He has over fifteen years’ experience as a neurobiologist having worked on both neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. A/Prof Howitt’s laboratory is focused on ubiquitin mediated trafficking of proteins in Parkinson’s disease, in particular, how exosomes (extracellular vesicles) can transport alpha-synuclein from cell to cell in the body. His previous work has investigated how to engineer exosomes to carry target proteins and identified the trafficking of the tumor suppresser PTEN in exosomes.