Laura Volpicelli-Daley earned her PhD in neuroscience from Emory University, where she studied receptor trafficking in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. During a short postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Richard Kahn, she studied membrane trafficking. As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Pietro De Camilli at Yale University, she studied lipid metabolism in the brain. While her husband completed a fellowship in sleep disorders at UPenn, Dr. Volpicelli-Daley was a senior scientist in the lab of Dr. Virginia M.-Y. Lee and Dr. John Trojanowski. There, she discovered that fibrils of alpha-synuclein seed the growth of aggregates from endogenously produced alpha-synuclein in neurons. As associate professor at UAB, her lab focuses on the impact of pathologic alpha-synuclein on cognitive and motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. In addition, the lab studies how accumulation of glycosphingolipids in the brain causes synapse loss and cognitive decline.