Professor Maestripieri obtained a laurea in Biology in 1987 and a doctorate in Psychobiology in 1992 from the Università di Roma La Sapienza, in Italy. After spending one year as a Visiting Researcher at the Sub-department of Animal Behaviour of the University of Cambridge in the U.K., he moved to Emory University, where he worked at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center from 1992 to 1999.