Michael Lazarou heads a laboratory focused on autophagy and mitochondrial quality control at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). He is the Deputy Head (Research) of WEHI’s Parkinson’s disease research centre and has a co-appointment at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University. Michael is a Rebecca Cooper Medical Research Foundation Fellow and a National Health and Medical Research Investigator fellow. He is a co-founder and scientific advisory board member of Automera, a biotech start-up focused on degrading disease targets through autophagy.
Michael’s graduate studies at La Trobe University focused on the assembly of mitochondrial protein complexes and how they break down in energy generation disorders. He undertook his postdoctoral studies in 2010 at the National Institutes of Health (USA) where he focused on the Parkinson’s disease proteins PINK1 and Parkin and their role in maintaining mitochondrial health through mitophagy, a degradative pathway that culls damaged mitochondria. Michael was recruited to the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University in June 2014, where he established his laboratory, before moving to WEHI in 2022. He was the recipient of the 2013 ASBMB Boomerang Award, the 2022 ASBMB Shimadzu Research Medal, and was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017–2020).