About me

PRESENT

I am a Research Director (equivalent of Full Professor) and head of the Human Reinforcement Learning team, which is part of the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationelles (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale & École Normale Supérieure, Paris). 

My main activity is research, but I also teach "Learning and Decision-Making" (with Maël Lebreton) at the Cognitive Science Master of the  École Normale Supérieure). I also coordinate (with Alda Mari) the Cognitive AI group of our department. 

I am a member of European Laboratory of Learning and Ingeligent Systems (ELLIS) Society, the Cercle FSER and the Humboldt-Stiftung. 

I also serve as an editor for Nature Communications AI and Computing. 

I am a co-author of the book Decision making: a Very Short Introduction 

BEFORE THAT

I was born in 1982 in Palermo (Sicily, Italy), where I lived until I graduated from  highschool (Liceo Classico G. Meli, 2000). 

I hold a Master degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Bologna (Italy, 2006) and a Master degree in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience from the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris, France, 2007). I hold a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris, France, 2012). 

I was a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Mathias Pessiglione, at the Brain and Spine Institute (Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris). My first post-doctoral position (2013) was at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (ENS, Paris) and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (University di Trento, Trento) in  Giorgio Coricelli's team. My second post-doctoral position (2014-2015) was at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London, London) in Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's team. My third post-doctoral position was at the the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (ENS, Paris) in Etienne Koechlin's team (2016).  

In 2017 I created my team (the Human Reinforcement Learning team), thanks to an ATIP-Avenir starting grant and the Programme Emergence(s) of the City of Paris. In 2019 I obtained a permanent position at INSERM and, after a few years (including several ANR grants and an ERC Consolidator Grant), I was promoted to Research Director at INSERM (2022).