Dr. Claudia Cecchetto is Junior Researcher (RTDA) at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padova, working in the Neurochip Lab (Prof. Stefano Vassanelli’s group).
She is currently working on her PNRR-MSCA project NEU-PAGES and curates also the management of Vassanelli’s H2020-EU projects SYNCH and NEUREKA. Her main research interests include in vivo electrophysiology, two-photon microscopy and high-resolution implantable electrical probes applied to the study of neuronal networks in the brain, particularly in the somatosensory area.
In December 2022, she got a PNRR-MSCA research grant funded by EU and the Italian Ministry of Research, with a project called NEU-PAGES. The aim of this 3-years project is to combine in vivo two-photon calcium and VSD imaging with implantable neuroprobes to study how whisker deflections are encoded into the barrel cortex of mice and how a local cortical network can be tuned by electrical stimuli delivered through the neuroprobe. Specifically, the various neuronal patterns evoked in the cortex by sensory and electrical stimuli will be analysed, classified, and compared using tailored machine learning methods.
From 2018 to 2020, she spent 2 years at OIST Graduate University (Okinawa, Japan) in Bernd Kuhn’s Optical Neuroimaging Unit, where she learnt in vivo two-photon imaging using AAV sensors and Voltage Sensitive Dyes. There, she completed her MSCA project GRACE, whose main aim was the simultaneous recording of two-photon imaging and high-resolution local field potentials from the mouse barrel cortex in response to whisker stimulations.
She graduated in Physics in Padova, and she obtained her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Department of Information Engineering in Padova, with a thesis on neuronal population encoding of sensory information in the rat barrel cortex studied through an innovative high-resolution brain-chip interface.
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claudia-Cecchetto
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudia-cecchetto-32739171/