Pietro De Camilli

Pietro De Camilli is an Italian-American biologist and Eugene Higgins Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

De Camilli completed his M.D. degree from the University of Milan in Italy. He then went to the United States and did his postdoctoral studies at Yale University.

De Camilli is known for contributions that has been to demonstrate the crucial role of protein-lipid interactions and phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of membrane traffic at the synapse.

He has received several awards and honors for his work. He was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1987. In 2001, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis together with Reinhard Jahn (Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry).

During synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter-containing vesicles fuse with the plasma membrane, releasing neurotransmitters into the synaptic space by exocytosis. In the subsequent seconds, vesicle membranes are reinternalized and reused for the next generation of synaptic vesicles. Over the last 25 years, Pietro De Camilli has studied the molecular mechanisms involved in this intricate cycle of membrane traffic and has identified and characterized numerous proteins that participate in the process. Trained as an M.D., he has also made significant contributions toward understanding human diseases of the nervous system that involve autoimmunity against synaptic proteins. Because the synaptic vesicle is a powerful model organelle for studying fundamental mechanisms in membrane-cytoskeletal interactions, membrane fusion, and membrane budding, De Camilli's discoveries are relevant to secretory and endocytic mechanisms in many fields beyond neurotransmission.