Professor De Camilli earned his M.D. from the University of Milano and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. After a brief return to Italy, he moved back to Yale in 1988 where he is Professor of Cell Biology and of Neuroscience. He served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology (1997-2000) and of the Department of Neuroscience (2015-2021) and in 2005 co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. Since 1992 he has been an Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the National Academy of Medicine (USA) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The De Camilli lab is interested in the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of cell membranes with emphasis on the role of these mechanisms in neuronal physiology. His studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His discovery and characterization of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of the endocytic pathway have broad implications in the fields of phospholipid signaling and of membrane traffic. More recently he helped advance the field of organelles cross-talk at membrane contact sites.