Alexander Francis Palazzo was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. As a graduate student in Gregg Gundersen’s laboratory at Columbia University, he discovered two major pathways that regulate cell polarity in migrating fibroblasts. After receiving his PhD in 2003, he moved to Tom Rapoport’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School where he was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow. There he investigated how newly synthesized mRNA is exported from the nucleus and then targeted to specific sites in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells, such as the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum. In 2009 he started his lab in the Biochemistry Department where he is currently a full professor. Besides his work on mRNA export and localization, Dr. Palazzo is interested in how biological information is extracted from the mammalian genome and how this influences evolution.