Dr Claudio Alfieri studied Molecular Biology at the Universities of Palermo (BSc) and Milano (MSc). During his MSc work, performed in the laboratory of Dr Peter De Wulf, he studied the S. cerevisiae kinetochore protein Cnn1p (CENP-T in human) by using yeast genetics and biochemistry.
During his PhD at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg) in the laboratory of Dr Christoph Müller, he studied the establishment of heritable chromatin domains, which during development, are transcriptionally silenced by Polycomb-group proteins by employing biochemical, biophysical and structural analysis (x-ray crystallography).
For his postdoctoral research, supported by a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Long-Term Fellowship and a EMBO Advanced Fellowship, in the laboratory of Dr David Barford at The Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), he solved the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C) with the Mitotic checkpoint complex (MCC), and determined the structural basis for the MCC complex disassembly by the AAA+ ATPase TRIP13 and its adaptor p31comet. For this work, in 2018, he has been awarded the Brenner Postdoc Prize.
In October 2019 he joined the ICR as a Sir Henry Dale Fellow working on the structure and molecular function of the Muv-B complexes in regulating cell cycle-dependent transcription.