Dr. Cavalli is the Robert E. and Louis F. Dunn Professor of Biomedical Research and Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. Dr. Cavalli earned her doctoral degree from the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 2000. During her graduate work Dr. Cavalli studied the signaling mechanisms regulating membrane trafficking in mammalian cells. She continued with postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego where she studied how vesicular transport impacts signaling along peripheral nerves, and, vice versa. She received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to continue her studies on injury signaling. She then joined the Washington University faculty in 2006 as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and Professor of Neuroscience in 2019. She was named the Robert E. and Louis F. Dunn Professor of Biomedical Research in 2021.