Advisory Committee

A native of Italy, De Camilli studied at the Liceo Manzoni in Milan, earned his M.D. degree from the University of Milano in 1972 and obtained a postgraduate degree in medical endocrinology from the University of Pavia in Italy. 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. Following a return of a few years to Milan, he moved back to Yale in the late 1980s, where he is now John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience. He became an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1992. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and since 2005 he is Founding Director of the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair (CNNR). He also served as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience from 2015 to 2021, and as Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience from 2015 to 2022.The De Camilli lab is interested in the cell biology of neuronal synapses. His studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His research has provided insight into mechanisms of membrane fission and has revealed ways through which membrane-associated proteins can generate, sense and stabilize lipid bilayer curvature. His discovery and characterization of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of endocytosis have broad implications in the fields of phospholipid signaling and of membrane traffic. Building on this work, he has recently become interested in the role of membrane contact sites in the control of the homeostasis of bilayer lipids. His studies of synapses have also contributed to the elucidation of pathogenetic mechanisms of human diseases, with recent emphasis on Parkinson's disease.

Anthony J. Koleske is an expert in understanding the biochemical mechanisms that regulate neuronal dendrite and synapse development. After receiving a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Koleske performed his Ph.D. studies with Dr. Richard Young at the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his Ph.D. thesis, Dr. Koleske discovered the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme, an important advancement in understanding how gene transcription is turned on. Dr. Koleske went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. David Baltimore at M.I.T., where he began his work studying cellular functions of Abl family kinases, which his laboratory has shown are essential regulators of the cytoskeleton in diverse cell types. Dr. Koleske joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1998, where he currently is Professor and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neuroscience. Dr. Koleske is the recipient of numerous awards including a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship, Special Fellowship and Scholar Awards from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Young Investigator and Established Investigator Awards from NARSAD, an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association. He has served widely on review panels, including terms as Chair of the Basic Science Study Section for the American Heart Association and the Neurodifferentiation, Plasticity, Repair, and Rhythmicity Study Section of the NIH. He served as Director of the combined PhD programs in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Yale (2014-2019).  He also served Director of the China Scholarship Council-Yale World Scholars Program (2014-2019) and was a co-Director of the Yale BioMed SURF Amgen Scholars Program (w/Faye Rogers and Barbara Kazmierczak)(2015-2020).

Dr. Schatz has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms that assemble and diversify antigen receptor genes that encode antibodies and T cell receptors.  He is best known for the discovery of RAG1 and RAG2, subsequent biochemical insights into RAG function and evolutionary origins, and the discovery of two distinct levels of regulation of somatic hypermutation. Schatz has co-authored over 180 articles, many in prestigious journals, and has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship, the Snow Prize (Yale University's top award to a graduating senior), the National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellows Award, the American Association of Immunologists-BD Biosciences Investigator Award, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, and election to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine. He has been active as an editor and reviewer, serving as Co-Editor of the journal Immunity, as a member of the editorial board of a number of journals, and as a member and Chair of the NIH study section Cellular and Molecular Immunology-A.  Schatz has also been very interested in graduate education, serving for many years as the Director of Graduate Studies and Graduate Admissions for Immunobiology and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) Program.  He remains strongly committed to enhancing predoctoral and postdoctoral training programs in his current role as Chair of the Department of Immunobiology. Schatz received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1980, and a M.A. degree in Philosophy and Politics from Oxford University in 1982. His Ph.D. degree (1990) and postdoctoral training were done with Dr. David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.