Pietro De Camilli earned his MD from the University of Milano and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. After a brief return to Italy, he returned to Yale as a faculty in the Department of Cell Biology (1988) and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1992. Prior to his current position, he served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and in 2005 co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

De Camilli’s lab investigates mechanisms underlying cell membranes dynamics, with emphasis on their role in neuronal physiology and synaptic transmission. His pioneering studies on synaptic vesicle recycling and on the role of phosphoinositides in control of endocytosis had broad implications in the fields of membrane traffic, phospholipid signaling and neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s.