Kavli Institute Director
Pietro De Camilli earned his M.D. degree from the University of Milano, Italy. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Paul Greengard at Yale. Following a brief return to Milan, he moved back to Yale in the late 1980s, where he is now John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Cell Biology. He became an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1992. From 1997 to 2000 he was Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Since 2015 he serves as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. De Camilli’s studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His discovery of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of synaptic vesicle recycling had broad implications in the fields of membrane traffic. Building on these studies, he has become interested in mechanisms that control membrane lipid homeostasis and in the dysfunction of these mechanisms in diseases of the nervous system. He is member of EMBO, of the National Academy of Science (USA), of the National Academy of Medicine (USA) and of the American Academy of Art and Sciences.