**Taras Y. Nazarko**

Taras Y. Nazarko (Associate Professor) runs an active autophagy lab in the Department of Biology at Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA). Most of his academic career to date has been devoted to the mechanistic understanding of autophagy, an important membrane trafficking pathway that delivers cytoplasm to a vacuole/lysosome for degradation and recycling. His training and expertise are in the selective autophagy pathways, especially the selective autophagy of peroxisomes (pexophagy) and lipid droplets (lipophagy). Together with his former mentors, students, national and international collaborators, he has discovered several new autophagy-related genes, such as *ATG26*, *ATG35*, *ATG37* and *TRS85*, and authored 24 peer-reviewed publications in the autophagy field.
