Francesco Tombola is associate professor in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine. He has been studying ion channels for over 15 years, and has experience with the identification of new channel-forming proteins and with the biophysical characterization of ion conduction pathways in membrane proteins. He has contributed to the establishment of new techniques to study ion channels, to the identification of drugs targeting ion channels, and to the discovery of new physiological functions of ion channels. His research has been funded by NIH, the American Heart Association, and the University of California, Irvine, and has been disseminated through published papers, review articles, and national and international invited lectures. He teaches nerve physiology and auditory physiology to medical students and ion channel physiology to graduate students.