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Research interests

Neurophysiology of Motor Control

The Motor System in Action Perception

The Motor System in Speech Perception

 Verbal and Non-Verbal Interpresonal Coordination

History of Neurophysiology

Main Methods

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Electromyography

Electroencephalography

Motion Capture

Eye-Tracking

Some Numbers

Scopus H-Index: 29

Scholar H-Index: 38

Scopus Citations > 3300

Scholar Citations > 6300

Some links

Bluesky

Mastodon

LinkedIn

I began my studies in Experimental Psychology with a thesis on neural network modelling (2003) and went on to complete a PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome (2007). During my doctoral work, I spent research periods at MIT (Cambridge, USA) and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), where I became increasingly interested in neurophysiological methods and motor control. This shift in focus continued during a three-year research fellowship at the University of Ferrara (2007–2010). In 2010, I joined the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, first as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher and, in 2012, as Team Leader in the Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences. At IIT, I had the opportunity to contribute to the long-term goal of studying humans to build better robots—and, in turn, using robots to better understand humans—an approach that has had a lasting influence on my perspective. This work was (and continues to be) carried out in the context of several EU-funded projects (Poeticon, Siempre, Poeticon++, Entimement, COBRA, and PRIMI). In 2016, I joined the IIT Center for Translational Neurophysiology, hosted by the University of Ferrara, where I have continued to pursue this line of research with a growing emphasis on clinical applications. In 2017, I was appointed Associate Professor, and in 2022, Full Professor of Physiology at the University of Ferrara. I have authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and have been invited to present my work on over 60 occasions. According to Google Scholar, my work has been cited over 6,000 times.