ISSNAF Lifetime Achievement Award 2025: Congratulations to Prof. Pietro De Camilli

Pietro de Camilli

The ISSNAF Lifetime Achievement Award honors distinguished individuals of Italian heritage whose pioneering vision and lifelong commitment have advanced knowledge, inspired others, and brought pride to their cultural roots through remarkable achievements in research, leadership, and mentorship across diverse disciplines.

Professor Pietro De Camilli, John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Cell Biology, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the Yale University School of Medicine, is internationally renowned for his pioneering research at the intersection of cell biology and neuroscience.

A native of Italy, he earned his M.D. from the University of Milano in 1972 and began his postdoctoral work at Yale in the late 1970s with Nobel laureate Paul Greengard. After a brief return to Milan, he moved back to Yale in 1988, where he has held major leadership roles — including Chair of Cell Biology, Chair of Neuroscience, and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair and served as President of the American Society of Cell Biology.

De Camilli’s work has transformed our understanding of how lipid membranes regulate the brain’s communication system. His studies on synaptic vesicles and phosphoinositide lipids have revealed how neurons recycle and reshape their membranes, discoveries that have influenced the fields of membrane trafficking, phospholipid signaling, and neurodegenerative disease. A major breakthrough came when his lab linked proteins central to neurotransmitter release to Parkinson’s-related genes, uncovering their role in maintaining the integrity of lysosomes, the cell’s “waste disposal” system — a discovery that opened new paths toward therapeutic targets.

An Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1992, De Camilli is an elected member of EMBO, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Italy’s Accademia dei Lincei.

Committed to bridging Italian and North American science, De Camilli has mentored generations of researchers while fostering international collaboration through ISSNAF. Living by the sea in Connecticut, he continues to find inspiration in nature — the same curiosity that first sparked his fascination with life. His message to young scientists remains timeless: embrace curiosity, balance passion with life, and never lose the excitement of discovery.