Pietro Yale University, USA
Pietro De Camilli is the John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Cell Biology at the Yale School of Medicine. A native of Italy, De Camilli earned his MD from the University of Milano in 1972. He was a postdoctoral fellow (1978-79) with Paul Greengard in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale and subsequently an Assistant Professor in the Yale Section of Cell Biology. He then returned to Italy, but subsequently moved back to Yale Cell Biology in the late 1980s. Since 1992 he has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and since 2005 as Founding Director of the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. In the Fall of 2015 he was named Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.
The De Camilli lab is interested in mechanisms underlying the dynamics and traffic of intracellular membranes, with an emphasis on the role of these processes at neuronal synapses in physiology and disease. De Camilli’s studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His research on endocytic mechanisms has provided insight into general mechanisms of membrane deformation and fission. His discovery and characterization of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of endocytic membrane flow have broad implications in the fields of phospholipid signaling and membrane traffic. Building on these studies, recently he has become interested in the role of lipid transport at membrane contact sites in the control membrane lipid homeostasis.
