Gianpiero D. Palermo, M.D., Ph.D., is Director of Assisted Fertilization and Andrology at The Ronald O. Perelman and Claudia Cohen Center for Reproductive Medicine (CRM), Professor of Embryology in Obstetrics & Gynecology and the Blavatnik Distinguished Professor of Reproductive Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Palermo has received international acclaim for his development of ICSI, the revolutionary procedure in which a single sperm is injected directly into an oocyte to achieve fertilization.

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection has become an essential technique in Reproductive Medicine since Dr. Palermo first developed it in 1992. Now routinely used around the world, ICSI has helped many men with severe forms of infertility to become fathers. Indeed, more than 9,284 healthy babies have resulted from ICSI procedures performed at CRM alone.

Dr. Palermo has received many prestigious awards and lecture invitations for his research and clinical work, including the Serono Prize for Medical Research on chromosomal analysis of embryos; the Barbara Eck Menning Founder's Award from RESOLVE, the national infertility organization; the Shackman Memorial Lecture at Johns Hopkins; the Buckeye Lecture of the American Society of Andrology; Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine; and The Russian Crystal Tube Award. He has delivered over 300 presentations before international audiences on topics in Reproductive Medicine, often related to his pioneering research. Dr. Palermo has presented more than 300 abstracts, prepared dozens of book chapters and authored or co-authored 128 peer reviewed articles for medical journals, including the first reports on the use of ICSI in the Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Palermo earned his M.D. at the School of Medicine at the University of Bari in Italy and his M.Sc. at Brussels Free University in Belgium. Having completed extensive fellowship training in Italy, Belgium and Australia, in 2005 Dr. Palermo was awarded Ph.D. in Reproduction and Development from Monash University for his thesis titled "Manipulation of Development by Nuclear Transfer."

He leads a team of talented researchers actively involved in molecular and genetic aspects of fertilization, follow-up of ICSI babies, genetic aspects of male infertility as well as devising new procedures to treat age-related female infertility, harvesting and differentiation of embryonic stem cells and in vitro maturation of male germ cells.