A native of San Francisco, California, Kelly Del Tredici, MD, PhD from the Institute for Clinical Neuroanatomy of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, studied medicine at the Universities of Halle (Saale) and Frankfurt. She came to Germany on a Fredrick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University in 1989 after having studied classical languages at Loyola University of Chicago and Fordham University in New York City.

After graduating from medical school in 2003 and completing her doctoral dissertation in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Frankfurt, she became a postdoctoral fellow in anatomy at the Dr. Senckenberg Anatomical Institute, where she has worked together with Prof. Heiko Braak, MD since 2000 and has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology since July 2005.

From 2005 until 2006, Dr. Del Tredici served as an assistant doctor in gerontopsychiatry at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Neurology in Winnenden (near Stuttgart), Germany. In October 2006, she received the Hilde Ulrichs Foundation Prize for Parkinson’s Research (Florstadt-Staden).