About me

PRESENT

I am a Research Director at the INSERM (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale) and  Professor of Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at the (École Normale Supérieure). I am head of the Human Reinforcement Learning team, which is part of the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationelles &, Paris). I also coordinate (with Alda Mari) the Cognitive AI group of our department. 

I teach "Learning and Decision-Making" (with Maël Lebreton) at the Cognitive Science Master of the  École Normale Supérieure). 

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).