Manuela Allegra is currently Permanent researcher at CNR working at the Neuroscience Department in Padua.
She graduated in Neurobiology at the University of Pisa in 2009 under the supervision of Prof Yuri Bozzi. She obtained a PhD in Neurobiology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2014, working in Prof Matteo Caleo’s lab, where the main focus of her research activity was the study of neuroplasticity mechanisms in physiological and pathological conditions, using the visual system of rodent models.
In 2017, Dr Allegra moved to Paris and joined the laboratory of Prof Christoph Schmidt-Hieber at the Institut Pasteur. Here she was awarded with the Marie Curie individual fellowship and her research activity was mainly focused on the hippocampal function in memory encoding and recall.
In 2020, she was appointed to a permanent research position by the CNR and she joined the Neuroscience Department in Padua, where she has started her own research group with a starting grant from Fondazione CaRiPaRo.
Her main research interest is centered on the field of neuroplasticity, studying the neural mechanisms
underlying the capability of the brain to rewire itself in response to environmental pressures and
focusing on the hippocampus and neocortex.