Her research activity focuses on identifying possible biological markers for the early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, specifically blood and CSF biomarkers, and their possible correlations with clinical and neuropsychological profiles. Moreover, Marta has been studying the pathological deposition of different proteins (e.g. alpha-synuclein, tau) in specific tissues (e.g. skin and gastrointestinal system), and the concomitant immunological changes occurring in the tissue. These projects, together with the evaluation of non-invasive techniques such as Optical Coherence Tomography, aim to identify specific patterns supporting the differential diagnosis of different conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and atypical parkinsonisms such as Multiple System Atrophy, as well as and other neurodegenerative disorders (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease).

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His scientific activities in the last years were dedicated, among the others, to the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and high-density electroencephalography (High-Density EEG), especially in the in the context of clinical research.

His research interests mainly include:

• Cognitive Neuroscience with a focus on neuroscience of language and communication;
• Neurophsysiology with a focus on neurophysiological correlates of predictive processing and on biomarkers of stroke recovery;
• Psychometrics with a focus on the development of new neuropsychological tests and on methodological improvements in clinical neuropsychology;
• Statistical analysis with the application of advanced analytical methods (Mixed models, Generalized Additive Models, Machine Learning, etc.);
• Open Science with a focus on sharing knowledge, sharing data, and reproducibility of analysis code.

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He earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering under the supervision of Prof. Alessandra Bertoldo with a thesis entitled “Quantitative neuroimaging of perfusion with Arterial Spin Labelling: deconvolution and physiology-based models”. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Information Engineering, at the Padova Neuroscience Center of the University of Padova and at the Department of Neuroscience, Medicine and movement of the University of Verona. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova.

His research interests mainly include artificial intelligence applied to MRI, to study perfusion, brain clearance and related disorders exploiting both medical images and biomedical signals.

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He is a biomedical engineering by training and holds a PhD in PET kinetic modelling. His main research interest is related to the development and validation of molecular neuroimaging biomarkers and to their use for drug development and precision medicine. With over 15 years of experience and 200+ peer-reviewed publications in analysing high-dimensional brain imaging data and large observational cohorts, his work focuses on transforming complex information into robust and clinically meaningful indicators.

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Mariagrazia Ranzini’s scientific research focuses primarily on the field of cognitive psychology. Her main research area is numerical cognition, specifically investigating how attention, memory and action processes contribute to the mental representation and processing of numerical, spatial and temporal quantities. She also studies synesthesia, embodied cognition, attention deficits and calculation deficits. She conducts her research using behavioural investigation methods, such as analysing accuracy, reaction times and eye movements, as well as the effects of prismatic adaptation and optokinetic stimulation, and hand kinematics. She also employs neuroimaging techniques (EEG, MEG, fNIRS): in particular, she has recently initiated a series of studies on the neural correlates common to quantity processing and manual actions (e.g. pointing, grasping objects) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

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Her research interests are focused on both advancing the applicability of diffuse optical techniques in both infant and adult populations and applying these techniques to study both pathological and healthy brain processes. She is interested in easing the use of fNIRS for all users, providing guidelines and tools, such as Array Designer, which could help users to objectively design their probe layout. She is also interested in applying fNIRS/DOT techniques to study cognitive processes in the healthy population, aiming to study cognitive functions in ecological settings. Her current research interests aim at evaluating the impact of glycemic variability and tight glycemic control on brain hemodynamics in the very preterm population and their impact on neurodevelopmental outcome, combining optical techniques, EEG and clinical and behavioral measures.

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His research activity focuses on the discovery and validation of central and peripheral neuropathological biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Parkinson’s Disease. Other research interests include clinical neuroanatomy of the human brainstem, nervous control of respiratory centers, infectious and inflammatory pathology of the brain and its relationship with neurodegeneration.

In the last 5 years Aron Emmi has published 50+ peer-reviewed articles in international journals in the field of neuroscience, neuropathology and human anatomy and presented his research activity as a speaker at over 60 national and international conferences. He serves as ad-hoc reviewer for several high-impact scientific journals (Nature NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, Movement Disorders, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, Neurobiology of Disease). He have co-authored 4 academic textbooks for students and specialists on neuroanatomy and microscopic anatomy.

Aron Emmi is a member of several national and international scientific organizations, including the Royal College of Pathologists, the European Confederation of Neuropathological Societies, and the italian group for neuromorphology.

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His training in biological research started with a master’s degree in molecular biology at University of Pisa (2006), where he also received an Honors degree in Biology after completing the graduate course at Scuola Normale Superiore. Then, he received his PhD Neuroscience, still from Scuola Normale Superiore (2010), after working under the supervision of prof.s Lamberto Maffei, Matteo Caleo, and Tommaso Pizzorusso on the effect of environmental stimuli on synaptic plasticity, using in vivo electrophysiology, imaging, and biochemistry. He then continued to explore these topics with a postdoc at the Neuroscience Institute of the National Research Council. In 2014, he moved to the Physiology Institute of Catholic University in Rome with an assistant professor position. While getting proficient in patch-clamp electrophysiology and coimmunoprecipitation techniques, he contributed to elucidate the effect of metabolic stressors, such as a hyperlipidic diet, in curbing synaptic plasticity. In 2017, Marco moved back to Scuola Normale Superiore, where he became assistant professor in Antonino Cattaneo’s lab, where he was introduced to the design and validation of genetically encoded tools for synapse labeling and analysis, which he used to create maps of in vivo synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, as well as to analyze the variations in the molecular composition of synapses in response to learning. In 2019, Marco obtained his first independent position as a researcher of the Neuroscience Institute of the National Research Council, where he was promoted senior investigator before moving to University of Padua in 2023.

Marco’s current research interests are focused on understanding how synapses are affected by physiological variations in sensory inputs as well as by pathological states, including Alzheimer’s disease and neuroinflammation. To answer his scientific questions, he employs a combination of genetically encoded reporters and probes, behavioral testing, electrophysiology, imaging, and biochemistry in preclinical models. His research is supported by grants from the Ministry of University and Research, as well as from private charities, such as AirAlzh (Italian Association for Research on Alzheimer’s).

Marco’s ultimate goal as a researcher is to make contributions which can be truly useful to ameliorating the condition of diseased people, by exploiting basic research to indicate new potential targets for the therapy of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases.

Scopus link: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=26424686300
Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=hkEBXloAAAAJ&hl=it

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Biosketch

Stefano Vassanelli graduated cum Laude in Medicine at the University of Padova and his doctoral thesis was awarded with the “Casati” price from the “Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei”. After completing a PhD in molecular biology and pathology he undertook postdoctoral research first at the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, Dpt. of Biochemistry, (Portland. Oregon, USA), and then at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Dpt. Membrane and Neurophysics (Martinsried, Germany) working on brain-chip interfaces for high-resolution recording of neuronal networks. Since 2001 he is leading the Neurochip laboratory at the University of Padova with main focus on development of high-density neural interfaces and their use for investigation of information processing mechanisms in brain microcircuits.

Contact

Deparment of Biomedical Sciences
University of Padova
via Marzolo 3, 35131 Padova, Italy
Tel.: +39 049 8275337
Fax.: +39 049 8275301
Email: stefano.vassanelli@unipd.it
Web site: www.vassanellilab.eu

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He obtained a M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2017, and he received a PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2021. He then pursued two years of postdoctoral research at the Intelligent Autonomous System laboratory, the University of Padova, Italy. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, since 2023. He spent 10 months as “visiting student” at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, and 7 months as “visiting researcher” at the Campus Biotech (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) in Gèneve, in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

The research activity of Stefano Tortora has been strongly characterized by a commitment to the emerging field of Neurorobotics. In particular, he has focused on its interdisciplinary engineering and neuroscientific aspects. His research has been passionately dedicated to improving the interaction between users and robotic devices by creating a new paradigm in human-machine interfacing (HMI) fusing multimodal information coming from wearable sensors and robot’s sensors. During the Ph.D. activity, Stefano Tortora worked on the development of hybrid human-machine interfaces (h-HMI) to decode movement intention from wearable sensors. In 2020, Stefano Tortora was among the first researchers in developing recurrent neural networks for gait decoding from electroencephalography data. He proposed and implemented novel probabilistic approaches combining brain and muscular activity to ensure a more reliable control of robotic devices.

Currently, his work concerns the integration of these h-HMI with shared-autonomy algorithms for the development of intelligent assistive devices aimed at enhancing the mobility of people with motor impairments. On these topics, Stefano Tortora is currently involved as research fellow in the PNRR PE8 “Age-IT – Ageing Well in an Ageing Society” project (https://ageit.eu/wp/), responsible for the analysis of multimodal EEG-EMG data for the control of a lower limb exoskeleton and other assistive robotic devices via machine learning and deep learning. Additionally, his project on the development of an intelligent lower limb exoskeleton has been recently founded within the PNRR PE1 “FAIR – Future Artificial Intelligence Research” initiative (https://fondazione-fair.it/cascade-calls/).

Stefano Tortora is Associate Editor for the European Journal on Artificial Intelligence, Guest Associated Editor and Review Editor for the journal “Frontiers in Neurorobotics”, and Guest Associated Editor for the journal “MDPI Applied Sciences” in the section on “Robotics and Automation”. He is also Publication Chair for the IEEE European Conference on Mobile Robots 2025 (https://ecmr2025.dei.unipd.it/). Since 2021, he is in charge of the course “Sistemi di elaborazione 1” at the Department of Statistical Sciences, and of the course of “Python Programming for Data Science and Engineering” within the Doctoral School of Information Engineering (University of Padova) and the National Doctorate in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM).

Stefano Tortora is one of the Team Managers of the WHi Team and Whi Students Team (University of Padova), participating at the Cybathlon BCI race since 2019. With his teams, Stefano Tortora won 2 gold medals, 1 silver medal and 1 bronze medal in the various Cybathlon editions, and received the BCI Jury Award for the most promising technology at the last Cybathlon 2024 in Zurich.

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