Laura Volpicelli-Daley, PhD, was a senior research investigator in the laboratory of Virginia Lee, MBA, PhD, and John Trojanowski, MD, PhD at the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she developed a novel pre-clinical model of Parkinson's in which normal, endogenous (within the body) alpha-synuclein can be damaged to form inclusions (clumps) with most of the features of those found in the disease. She performed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Cell Biology Department at Yale University in the laboratory of Pietro De Camilli, MD, Howard Hughes Investigator and co-director of the Center for Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. In graduate school at Emory University, she studied the cell biological mechanisms related to Alzheimer's disease in the laboratory of Allan Levey, MD, PhD, chairman of the Neurology Department and director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center. Dr. Volpicelli-Daley's goals are to determine how pathologic alpha-synuclein contributes to Lewy body diseases from basic science/cell biology to behavior.