Elena Dreosti graduated in 2006 with a first-class degree in Medical Biotechnology and Cellular neuroscience from the University of Trieste (Italy). During her internship in the lab of Enrico Cherubini at the ISAS of Trieste, she discovered her passion for neuroscience research. Therefore, she moved to Cambridge (UK) to carry out her PhD studies with Leon Lagnado at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Here she focused on understanding how visual stimuli are processed within the retina of zebrafish animals, and she developed the first generation of genetically encoded calcium indicators to monitor synaptic activity, SyGCaMP. 

She was then awarded with a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to work in the labs of Emre Yaksi in Leuven (Belgium), Michael Orger in Lisbon (Portugal) and Steve Wilson at UCL (London, UK). During this time she demonstrated that vertebrate brains are endowed with functional asymmetries, and different hemispheres can process different information similarly to human brains.

In 2016 she started her independent research group as Wellcome Trust & Royal Society Sir Henry dale Fellow at UCL, and she is pioneering the use of zebrafish to study social behaviour in health and disease. 

Her passion for training the new generation of scientists led her to join the Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme in 2020, and to become in 2022 the Executive Director of the programme. During this time she has developed a new series of highly scalable and hands-on courses on fundamentals of neuroscience called the NeuroKits.