I am Lecturer in the Neuroengineering Lab (LinkedIn) of the Montefiore Institute, University of Liege, where I lead the Embodied Excitability group. I am also a starting grant awardeed and a researcher for the WEL Research Institute, Wavre, Belgium.
My pages on:
Research Gate, Google Scholar, Montefiore Institute, LinkedIn
My CV (more or less updated)
I am broadly interested in the interaction between mathematics, biology (particularly neuroscience), and engineering (particularly control theory and neuromorphic engineering). The brain, its way of knowing and perceiving the world, and the ways in which biology and intelligence seem to self-organize out of inert matter, always fascinated me. As a physicist, I consider mathematics the natural language through which to describe the various facets of the biological world. Control theory provides me with both a conceptual and a technical framework to use mathematics to describe open systems, that is, systems with inputs and outputs, like our brain, like a single cell, like a group of neurons or people or bees or robots or ants; like all those artificial or biological forms in constant interaction with their environment:
"Whatever is the ultimate nature of reality (assuming that this expression has meaning), it is indisputable that our universe is not chaos. We perceive beings, objects, things to which we give names. These beings or things are forms or structures endowed with a degree of stability; they take up some part of space and last for some part of time." René Thom
Neuromorphic control theory and spiking control systems
Excitable analog electronic circuits; excitable sensors and actuators
Flexible sensorimotor control
Neuroscience and interdisciplinary research
Alessio Franci is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Liege and a founder of the ULiege Neuroengineering Lab. He is also a WEL Research Institute researcher through a 2023 WEL-T Starting Grant. In 2025, he shared with A.Bizyaeva and N.Leonard the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award.
Alessio received his MSc from the University of Pisa in 2008 and his PhD from the University of Paris Sud XI in 2012. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liege, INRIA Lille, and the University of Cambridge. Between 2015 and 2022 he was a professor in the Math Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His main research interests are in neuromorphic control theory, including spiking control systems, excitable analog CMOS circuits, excitable sensors and actuators, and flexible sensorimotor control. He has also been constantly engaged in and always looking for new interdisciplinary collaborations in neuroscience, robotics, art-and-science, molecular biology, and political science.