[About Me]

After completing my master’s in Biomedical Engineeering at University of Pisa, I worked for one year as Young Graduate Trainee at the European Space Agency, in the Advanced Concepts Team; here, I collaborated on a project led by University of Oxford, aimed at elucidating the benefits of physical exercise on mental health to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation, a highly promising line of research for long-distance manned space missions.

After the YGT, I moved to Berlin, Germany, to work as Early Stage Researcher in the Marie-Curie ITN “PredictAble”, with the industrial partner NIRx Medical Tecnologies, where I mainly contributed to the software development projects. For my PhD I worked at TU Berlin, in the lab of Prof. Benjamin Blankertz. My project focused on developing tools that, using multivariate feature vectors and machine learning algorithms, can make the analysis of fNIRS data more sensitive than that based on channel-wise general linear models.

In 2017, I spent 4 months in New Haven (CT, USA) as visiting researcher at Haskins Laboratories, a secondary partner of the ITN, working on analysing a large fNIRS dataset aimed at investigating the effects of literacy acquisition in children on functional brain organization.

In September 2019 I finished my PhD and obtained my first post-doc position in Paris, in Prof. Judit Gervain’s lab at Universitè Paris Descartes. Here, I worked on designing and validating ad-hoc strategies for the analysis of newborn fNIRS data.

In 2020 I moved to the BabyLab of the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation of University of Padova, and I recently obtained a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship with the project "BabyMindReader", which I will carry out in 2022 and 2023.