About me

I’m a PhD student in Neuroscience at the Padova Neuroscience Center and I am part of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Physics (Liph Lab) of the University of Padova.

I’ve got a bachelor degree in Physics from the University of Padova and a Master Degree in Physics of Complex Systems from the University of Turin. During my master thesis I’ve been fascinated by the possible applications of the Physics of Complex Systems to the Computational Neuroscience world, and decided indeed to dive into this field.

I am supervised by Samir Suweis, and collaborate with the laboratory of Stefano Vassanelli and with Ramon Guevara Erra.

I have been studying the brain criticality hypothesis in the rat barrel cortex, focusing in particular on studying criticality or deviations thereof in perturbed conditions (see for example here and here). I’ve also focused on disentangling the contributions of the external and of the intrinsic network dynamics on the signatures of criticality that we observe in the rat barrel cortex (see for example here).

I am in general interested in studying collective properties like the oscillatory behavior and synchronization phenomena in the barrel cortex during the processing of a sensory input and in understanding their functional role. The understanding of these aspects would enable, as a long term goal, to induce desired oscillations and responses in the barrel cortex, i. e. in a sense to control the system.

The methods I am interested in are massive data analysis and computational/mathematical modeling, in order to reverse engineer the features that emerge from data.