Silvia Benavides Varela

Silvia Benavides Varela is Associate Professor at the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology and Department of Neuroscience at Padua University.

 

She is trained as a biotechnology engineer, obtained a PhD in Neuroscience under the mentorship of Jacques Mehler from SISSA, Trieste, Italy. She then worked as a post doctoral researcher at the IRCSS San Camillo Hospital in Venice, and the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (CNRS & Université Paris Descartes), in Paris, France.

 

The most important part of her research focused on developing new methods for unveiling the initial state of memory capacities in humans, the environmental factors that modulate learning, and the properties of the brain systems that support language and mathematic achievements across the life-span. She uses a range of neuroimaging techniques including electroencephalography, and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) in combination with behavioral metrics and analyses, both in healthy and in clinical populations.

Filippo Pisano

Filippo Pisano is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padua.

 

His research focuses on the development of next-generation tools and methods for optical neural interfaces, harnessing light-brain interactions for multimodal, bidirectional and minimally invasive communication with the brain.

 

He obtained his Master’s Degree in Physics at the University of Turin (2012) and his PhD in Physics at Institute of Photonics at the university of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK (2017), where he worked on largescale opto-electronic interfaces with neural circuits in the mouse retina. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, US (2015).

 

He was a Post-Doc (2017-2021) and a Researcher (2021-2023) at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia-Center for Biomolecular Nanotechnologies, where he worked on photonic neural interfaces based on tapered optical fiber probes, partecipating in large european initiatives such as the DEEPER project (https://deeperproject.eu/).

 

Filippo is a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2024 for the project NEUROLIDAR: measuring neural dynamics with label-free optical multi-domain recordings.

Michele Allegra

Michele Allegra is Researcher (RTD-A) since September 2021 at the “Galileo Galilei” Physics and Astronomy Department and the Padua Neuroscience Center of the University of Padua.

 

Upon completing a Ph.D in quantum physics at University of Turin, my research interests switched towards data analysis for neuroscience and I joined the Statistical and Biological Physics sector of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, where I worked in Prof. Alessandro Laio’s group from 2015 to 2018. My research activity within Laio’s group focused on advanced clustering techniques and their application to the study of dynamically changing brain connectivity. I deepended my focus on neuroscience during my stay at the Timone Neuroscience Institute (CNRS) in Marseille (2018-2021), where I joined the BraiNets group led by Andrea Brovelli. In Marseille I worked on the characterization of directional connections in brain networks, and their disruption in stroke.

 

My main research interest is understanding functional connections and in the brain, and their relation with the underlying dynamics. In my research I use a wide variety of tools including dimensionality reduction, information theory, and model inference.

 

I am author of 18 publications, of which 11 as a leading author. I lecture on statistics, data analysis, inference and information theory to physics undergraduate students and Neuroscience PhD students.

 

Personal web page: https://micheleallegra.github.io/

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pwlWv54AAAAJ&hl=it&oi=ao

Ramón Guevara

Ramón Guevara is currently a Research Technologist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padua, Italy.

 

He is a biophysicist and neuroscientist. He studied physics, earning an M.Sc in theoretical condense matter physics at the University of Havana, and an M.Sc in high energy physics at the Abdus Salam International Center of Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. He defended his Ph.D thesis at the University of Trieste, Italy, in 2003, in the field of theoretical particle physics and cosmology, after which he worked at several universities, research institutes and hospitals in Italy, Spain, France and Canada. He is currently a Research Technologist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padua, Italy.

 

His main research interest is the temporal coordination dynamics in the nervous system, and the investigation of the mechanisms and functional role of neuronal oscillations and synchronization in cognition and brain pathologies. He applies mathematical methods and concepts form the fields of nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics and information theory in his research. He has also contributed to the investigation of brain functional connectivity in non-invasive recordings of the human brain (electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography) from the methodological point of view. He has investigated how excessive neuronal synchronization leads to pathologies such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, and the importance of noisy, non-synchronized activity for the emergence of consciousness. Other topics he has investigated includes diffusion processes in decisions making, time perception, stochastic resonance in vision and the role of brain oscillations in speech processing.

 

His teaching activity includes the Biomedical Modeling course for the Master in Biomedical Engineer at the University Paris Descartes in Paris, France, and the Physics and Biophysics course for the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Padua, held in Treviso, Italy, as well as shorter courses in more specialized topics at the University of Toronto in Canada and the Basque Center for Brain, Cognition and Language, in San Sebastian, Spain.

Manfredo Atzori

Manfredo Atzori is Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Padova.

 

He received a M.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2006 and 2009 at the University of Padova. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Padova. He has been research scientist at the Institute of Information Systems of the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais) since 2011.

His research interests are related to the development of machine learning techniques targeting multimodal data analysis, particularly in the biomedical domain.

 

Since 2019 he is the Scientific Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 project ExaMode, involving seven international partners and targeting weakly-supervised knowledge discovery from multimodal medical data, such as text and images, in the context of digital pathology (htttp://www.examode.eu/).

Since 2011 he collected and has managed Ninapro, a publicly available database aiming at improving the control of robotic hand prostheses with machine learning and data fusion, currently having several thousand users worldwide (http://ninapro.hevs.ch/).

He has been the coordinator of the Hasler Fundation financed ProHand project, targeting the development of 3D printed robotic prosthetic hands controlled via machine learning approaches.

Between 2016 and 2019, Prof. Atzori had a leading role in the MeganePro Project, involving three international partners. The project was aimed at improving robotic prosthesis control with eye-hand coordination and at better understanding the neurocognitive effects of amputations. Multimodal data were released in the context of the project, including electromyography, intertial, gaze tracking, visual, behavioral and clinical data for prosthetics and phantom limb sensation analyses.

Since 2015 he has worked on the development of computer aided diagnostic systems for cancer in byopsies using computer vision techniques such as convolutional neural networks.

In 2015, Prof. Atzori was among the first researchers worldwide in developing convolutional neural networks for surface electromyography data analysis.

Prof. Atzori is author of over 80 peer reviewed scientific publications with over 2’000 citations and he presented his work, also as invited speaker, at several international conferences.

He is member of the editorial board of Scientific Data (Nature Publishing Group).

Finally, Prof. Atzori has strong experience in developing scientific projects in collaboration with academic research groups and companies.

Antonio Maffei

Antonio Maffei is an Assistant Professor (RTD-a) at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization (DPSS) of the University of Padova.

 

He obtained his Master’s Degree in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in 2014, and his PhD in Psychological Sciences in 2019 from the University of Padova (Supervisor: Prof. Alessandro Angrilli).

 

He held positions as a junior and senior postdoctoral fellow at the Department of General Psychology (Supervisor: Prof. Alessandro Angrilli), Padova Neuroscience Center, and Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization (Supervisor: Prof. Paola Sessa) of the University of Padova. Furthermore, he has been a visiting researcher at the University of Würzburg (Germany) and the Babes-Bolyai University (Romania).

 

His research interests are focused on understanding the psychobiological correlates of emotional behavior in healthy and subclinical populations, taking advantage of a wide range of electrophysiological techniques for measuring activity in the central (EEG/MEG) and peripheral nervous system (ECG, EMG, GSR). Furthermore, he is interested in devising ecological experimental approaches for experimental emotional induction.

 

Active research lines cover the following topics:

  • Characterizing how social support, social relationships, and social isolation shape stress reactivity, with a focus on the cardiovascular component of the stress response
  • Characterizing the psychophysiological implications of emotional contagion of stress
  • Developing new statistical tools for assessing interindividual synchronization in brain and peripheral nervous system activity during ecological emotional induction

 

Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57103014500

Scholar: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=9Tr6JR4AAAAJ&hl=it

 

Arianna Menardi

Arianna Menardi works as a Researcher (RTD-A) at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Padova.

 

During her career, she collaborated with several national and international research groups. In 2017, she joined the Berenson-Allen Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation at Harvard Medical School, where she worked under the Supervision of Prof. Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Dr. Emiliano Santarnecchi in studying cortical excitability (as assessed by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation-TMS) in Alzheimer’s Disease patients. In 2018 she joined the Brain Investigation and Neuromodulation Lab in Siena, where she worked on network-targeted interventions by means of multi-electrodes transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) during concomitant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), under the supervision of Prof. Simone Rossi and Dr. Emiliano Santarnecchi. In 2019 she started her PhD at the Padova Neuroscience Center, under the supervision of Prof. Antonino Vallesi, Prof. Maurizio Corbetta and Dr. Emiliano Santarnecchi. Her PhD project focused on the study of interindividual differences in the brain topographical properties for the selection of personalized stimulation targets in the brain. Collaborators to this project included Prof. Marie Banich and Prof. Naomi Friedman for the University of Colorado Boulder, Prof. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Dr. Emma Towlson from the Notheastern University, in Boston.

 

More recently, Arianna won a Grant for Young Researchers by the Italian Association for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease to investigate individual alterations in the functional connectivity as a potential early biomarker of pathology progression.

Camillo Porcaro

Camillo Porcaro is an Associate Professor in Bioengineering at the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Padova.

 

He is a computational neuroscientist with a core interest in developing analytical methods for extracting information from non-invasive measures of brain activity. His research focuses on identifying functional brain sources from data obtained through neuroimaging techniques. In 2008 he defended with honours his doctoral thesis in “Functional Neuroimaging: from Cells to Systems” at the Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies (ITAB), University of Chieti, Italy. The same year, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham – School of Psychology, using simultaneous EEG/fMRI. In 2011, he joined the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, after gaining a highly competitive independent research position.

From October 2011 to September 2021, he was an Independent Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) – National Research Council (CNR), Rome, Italy. Furthermore, in 2014 and 2015, he was invited as Visiting Professor at the Neural Control of Movement Lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology ETH, Zurich, Switzerland and from 2015 to 2022 as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona (Professor of Bio-imaging and Brain Research at the Department of Biomedical Engineering). In addition, from 2016 to 2020, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Human Kinesiology, Movement Control & Neuroplasticity Research Group, KU Leuven, Belgium and from 2018 to 2021, he was Head of the Research hdEEG Lab at S. Anna Institute and Research in Advanced Neurorehabilitation (RAN), Crotone, Italy. Finally, since October 2021, he has been appointed Associate Professor at Padua University – Department of Neuroscience. His most successful contributions have involved source extraction with advanced methods, including Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and a modification of this algorithm called Functional Source Separation (FSS). Furthermore, he developed various temporal and spectral constraints (the basis for FSS algorithms) for extracting and validating primary cortical areas. Recently, he has started applying
FSS to EEG data recorded in the MRI environment to improve the quality of EEG data at the individual study level. His recent research focuses on developing functional constraints for the identification of complex cortical networks and the identification of resting-state functional networks (RSN) from EEG and fMRI recordings with the ultimate goal of characterising the neuronal dynamics of these networks using complex nonlinear methods such as Fractal Dimension.

 

He currently holds the following roles:

  • Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience (ING-INF/06).
  • Academic Board Member of the PhD in Neuroscience (PNC).
  • IEEE Senior Member.
  • External expert assisting the European Research Executive Agency.
  • Honorary Senior Research Fellow – School of Psychology, Birmingham University Imaging Center (BUIC), Birmingham, UK.
  • Ordinary Member of the National Group of Biomedical Engineering.

 

National scientific qualifications (ASN):

  • Associate Professor in Bioengineering (09/G2 – ING-INF/06).
  • Associate Professor in Physiology (BIO/09 – 05/D1)

Alessandra Bertoldo

Alessandra Bertoldo is Full Professor of Bioengineering at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. 

 

Her research interests are mainly related to the development of mathematical models for analysis and control of biological systems and to the quantification of functional positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance images. Current personal and collaborative research activities include: Mathematical models for quantitative PET studies, Methods for magnetic resonance functional imaging, Imaging genetics, Non-linear mixed effects modeling, Quantitative multimodal imaging.

 

During her career, she has contributed to several national as well as international research projects. She teaches Imaging for Neuroscience for the Bioengineering Master’s Degree Program at the University of Padova. From 2015, she also teaches Statistical Methods for Bioengineering (Bachelor’s Degree Program in Information Engineering at the University of Padova).

She is the Referent of the Master’s Degree Program in Bioengineering and of the Bachelor’s Degree Program in Biomedical Engineering.

She is member of the board of the Doctoral School on Neuroscience of the Padova Neuroscience Center of the University of Padova.

Since November 2015, she is member of the IEEE-EMBC Technical Committee on Biomedical Imaging and Image Processing.

Since May 2016 she is member of the Board of Directors of the Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova. Since March 2017, she is vice-director of the Padova Neuroscience Center of the University of Padova.

In August 2022, she was appointed Director of the Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova.

 

Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=6603190822

Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandra_Bertoldo

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=m0GuxsoAAAAJ&hl=en

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