Luca Pasa

Luca Pasa earned his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Padova in 2013. Subsequently, at the same institution, he successfully completed his Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences (curriculum Computer Science) in March 2017, under the supervision of Professor Alessandro Sperduti. Between July 2017 and June 2019, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Translational Neurophysiology Speech and Communication (CTNSC) within the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), working under the supervision of Dr. Leonardo Badino. Subsequently, from July 2019 to December 2021, he continued his research activity as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and the Human Inspired Technologies Research Center.

 

Since January 2022, Luca Pasa has held the position of Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Padova. His main research interests lie in the field of Machine Learning, including Deep Learning, Computational Neuroscience, and Automatic Speech Recognition. Currently, his research activity is focused on the application of Deep Learning methods on structured domains (sequences, trees, and graphs).

 

Luca Pasa has co-authored numerous research papers published in international peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Additionally, he has served as a Program Committee member for several Machine Learning conferences and has actively organized special sessions at various international Machine Learning conferences. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS). He is also a member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the IEEE Task Force on Deep Learning, and the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA).

Marta Campagnolo

Marta Campagnolo obtained her Master’s Degree in Medicine in 2008 and her Residency in Neurology in 2017, both from the University of Padova. She was a Research Fellow at the Center for Autonomic and Peripheral Nerve Disorders at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, and in 2021 she was awarded her PhD in Translational Specialistic Medicine ‘G.B. Morgagni’, Neuroscience curriculum, at the University of Padova. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Neurology (RTDa) at the Department of Neuroscience.

 

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).

Marco Castellaro

Marco Castellaro is a Research Fellow in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Padova.

 

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.

Aron Emmi

Currently, Aron Emmi serves as Assistant Professor of Human Anatomy at the Institute of Human Anatomy, Department of Neuroscience of the University of Padova, where he has previously obtained his degree and doctoral degree (PhD) and completed his post-graduate training in neuropathology and clinical neuroanatomy. He have also undergone post-doctoral training in forensic neuropathology.

 

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.

Stefano Tortora

Stefano Tortora is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova.

 

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.

Maria Elena Miletto Petrazzini

Maria Elena Miletto Petrazzini is a Researcher (RTDa) at the Department of General Psychology of the University of Padova.

 

She received from M.I.U.R (Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research) the National Scientific Habilitation as Associate Professor in General Psychology, Psychobiology and Psychometrics (11/E1).

 

She got a Master degree in Evolution of Animal and Human Behaviour (cum laude) at the University of Torino in 2009. She obtained a Ph.D in Psychological Sciences at the University of Padova (2014) working on the mechanisms underlying non-verbal numerical abilities using fish as model species. She worked as post-doctoral fellow at the Department of General Psychology, University of Padova (2014-2018) and then she moved to London where she worked as Marie Curie research fellow at Queen Mary University of London (2018-2020). From 2020 to 2021 she was a Stars-Grant post-doctoral fellow at the University of Padova (Department of Biomedical Science).

 

Her research interest focuses on the evolution of cognitive abilities in animals, with specific reference to the non-verbal numerical systems, visual perception and the impact of brain lateralization on cognitive functions, by combining behaviour with in vivo imaging.

 

She attracted more than 300k  of research grants by successfully participating in competitive calls at national and international level. In 2017 she won a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship and in 2019 she was granted by the University of Padua with the STARS Starting Grant.

 

She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals and 5 book chapters. She has organized 2 symposia and she has been invited as a speaker in national and international conferences and research institutes.

 

She regularly acts as a reviewer for international peer-review journals in the field of comparative psychology and she is Guest Editors of special issues in peer-review scientific journals.

 

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=it&user=pSBUG4QAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

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

Paola Rigo

Paola Rigo is an Assistant Professor (RTD-B) at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation of the University of Padua.

 

She received her master’s degree in Psychology path Neuroscience (2009) and her Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences and Education (2013) at the University of Trento. As a Ph.D. student, she visited the Family and Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Denver (CO, US). She was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Health (NICHD -NIH, Bethesda, MD, US; 2014-2015) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore, SG; 2016-2017).

Scientific Production
She is an author of 22 peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals (most of them in high-quality journals including Scientific Report Nature, Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences, Developmental Review, NeuroImage and Social neuroscience), 1 book and 4 book chapters. She served as an ad-hoc reviewer for Behavioural Brain Research, Brain Imaging and Behavior, Brain Research, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, Developmental Psychobiology, Parenting: Science and Practice, Perceptual & Motor Skills Journal, PLOS ONE, Psychological Reports, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, and Social Neuroscience. She was a Guest Editor for Infant Behavior and Development Journal (Edited by Esposito, Bornstein & Rigo, 2020).

Grant and Award
She is a PI of a Research Project funded by BIRD182991-2019 (15K EUR), and a Co-PI of several Research Projects funded by PRIN 2017 (around 119K EUR), Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 Grant 2016 (circa 67K EUR), BIRD195080-2020; (28K EUR), Padova Neuroscience Center, PCN (5K EUR). She received the Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) as Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow (NIH, 2014).

Research Interest and Collaborations
Her research interest focuses on the psychobiological basis of parenting and intersubjectivity. Through an ecological and interdisciplinary perspective, she investigates how caregivers’ response is modulated by the interplay between individual and clinical factors of parents (e.g., temperament, mood) and biological changes occurring during the early post-partum period. In connection with these studies; her research also investigates the effect of situational context in which parents respond to infant needs. She uses an integrated approach that spans from psychological measures to observational, behavioral, and neuroimaging studies (fMRI). National and international research collaborations: Alessandra Simonelli (University of Padova), Pilyoung Kim (University of Denver), Xiaoxia Du (East China Normal University), Marc H. Bornstein, (NIH), Gianluca Esposito (Nanyang Technological University, University of Trento), Paola Venuti (University of Trento). Since 2012, she is a member of the Special Community Membership of the University of Denver (Dr. Kim).

Francesco Marchetti

Francesco Marchetti is a fixed-term researcher (RTDa) at the Department of Mathematics “Tullio Levi-Civita” of the University of Padova.

 

I got my master degree in Mathematics and my PhD in Health Planning Sciences at the University of Padova in 2016 and 2021, respectively.

In my master thesis and during my PhD, I worked in the field of Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI), which is a novel tracer-based medical imaging technique, studying effective approximation schemes suitable for reconstructing signals along Lissajous curves, which are typical sampling trajectories in a MPI scanner. Moreover, I studied and applied kernel-based machine learning techniques in the context of rare diseases diagnosis and in the classification of patient-derived xenografts.

After the PhD, I started collaborating with the MIDA group of the University of Genova in the field of space weather forecasting, and I analysed and applied deep learning methods. Then, I won a one year postdoctoral grant sponsored by the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica (INdAM). The research project linked to my current position concerns p-Laplacians on hypergraphs and related machine learning approaches.

 

My research interest is mainly in approximation theory, kernel-based approximation and machine learning, deep learning, medical imaging and space weather forecasting. I am part of the research groups CAA (Constructive Approximation and Applications) between the Universities of Padova and Verona, Rete Italiana di Approssimazione (RITA) and Methods for Image and Data Analysis (MIDA).

Alessandro Salvalaggio

Alessandro Salvalaggio is a neurologist, researcher (RTT) at the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Padova.

 

He graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 2012 and completed his residency in Neurology in 2018 at the University of Padova. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience in 2022 at Padova Neuroscience Center, with a thesis on brain disconnection in focal lesions (stroke, gliomas).

 

Main interests:

  • Impact of brain tumors and cancer treatments on clinical outcomes (cognitive and neurological impairment, survival) mediated by structural and functional disconnection.
  • Neurological complications of cancer.
  • Transthyretin amyloidosis and peripheral neuropathies.

 

Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=56359388100

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

Andrea Guerra

Andrea Guerra is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Padua.

 

He graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 2010 and completed his residency in Neurology in 2016 at the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome (Paolo Maria Rossini’s group and Vincenzo Di Lazzaro’s group), where he developed skills in neurodegenerative disorders (movement disorders and dementia) and clinical neurophysiology.

 

In 2015, he had a clinical-research fellowship in Experimental Neurology and Movement Disorders at the University of Oxford (Peter Brown’s group), where he worked on invasive (i.e. Deep Brain Stimulation – DBS) and non-invasive brain stimulation methods to modulate brain oscillations in patients with movement disorders. From 2016 to February 2023, he worked at the Department of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome (Alfredo Berardelli’s group), where he completed his PhD in Clinical-Experimental Neuroscience, spent two years as a post-doc and then became Assistant Professor in Neurology (RTD-A). During these years, he improved his skills in neuropharmacology and advanced treatments for movement disorders, particularly Parkinson’s Disease (PD). In the last ten years, he received various awards from national and international scientific societies for his research and has been an invited speaker at several academic congresses. He has recently won competitive grants funded by the Italian Ministry of Health (“Ricerca Finalizzata”, GR-2021) and the Italian Ministry of University and Research (“Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale”, PRIN 2022 PNRR), as research project’s PI. In 2022, he was awarded the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor of Neurology, and in March 2023 moved to the University of Padua.

 

His research activity focuses on studying brain excitability, connectivity and plasticity changes in patients with movement disorders using various neurophysiological techniques, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and high-density electroencephalography (HD-EEG). He also applies non-invasive brain stimulation methods in these patients to modulate neurophysiological and behavioural functions with potential therapeutic purposes. Finally, he investigates the clinical and neurophysiological effects of DBS in movement disorders and uses local field potentials (LFPs) recordings from the basal ganglia nuclei to improve the understanding of the pathophysiology of these diseases and optimize DBS clinical effects.

 

Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=24437794700

Andrea Zangrossi

Andrea Zangrossi is researcher (RTT) at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (FISPPA) of the University of Padova.

 

He obtained a Master’s Degree in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in 2011, and a PhD in Psychological Sciences in 2017 at the University of Padova (Supervisor: Prof. Giuseppe Sartori). During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN), Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) where he collaborated with Prof. John-Dylan Haynes.

 

Between 2017 and 2023, he held positions as postoctoral fellow at the Department of Neuroscience (DNS), and at the Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC) of the University of Padova, under the supervision of Prof. Maurizio Corbetta. In 2018 he won a grant from the BIAL Foundation with a project entitled “When style matters: do oculomotor fingerprint and brain dynamics explain visual exploration and memory strategies?”.

 

His research activity is mainly focused on the following topics: behavioral prediction, the relation between oculomotor behavior and brain functioning, behavioral and psychophisiological techniques to reveal individual information (e.g., autobiographical memories). He also actively seeks to translate these approaches into clinical and forensic neuroscience applications.

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.