Marzia De Lucia, principal investigator
Marzia De Lucia is principal investigator, senior scientist and lecturer at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of Lausanne University Hospital in Lausanne and head of the EEG platform in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience of the University Hospital in Lausanne. Her team is part of the Laboratory of Research in Neuroimaging.
Marzia De Lucia's work focuses on the investigation of the neural bases of human cognition in altered states of consciousness and on methods development for the analysis of electrophysiologic signals in humans. This research is developed through the collaboration with the intensive care of the University Hospital of Lausanne and Bern which has resulted in the collection of hundreds of EEG recordings in comatose patients at bedsise in a variety of clincial settings and experimental conditions.
Trained as physicist at the University La Sapienza in Rome, she joined the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, supported by a Marie Curie Training site fellowship under the supervision of Prof Vincent Walsh. She was research fellow at the Medical Physics Department of the same university supervised by Prof David Holder and Prof Peter Dayan. In 2006, she joined the Center for Biomedical Imaging of the Lausanne University Hospital as research scientist in the group led by Prof Micah Murray and appointed senior scientist and lecturer (Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche) in 2016 in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience.
Andria Pelentritou, research fellow
Andria completed her undergraduate and Masters' studies in Natural Sciences at UCL. Her Master's thesis, under the supervision of Professor Neil Burgess, investigated a prediction error hypothesis for the extinction of fear memories. Her interest in consciousness research led her to Melbourne and SUT where she completed her PhD under Professor David Liley's supervision. The project looked at the effects of gaseous NMDA-based anaesthesia in healthy participants by acquiring simultaneous MEG and EEG during Xenon and Nitrous Oxide administration and performing sensor and source level imaging and connectivity and network dynamics' analysis. Building on her interest in electrophysiology and consciousness, she has joined Marzia's lab to investigate the effects of interoceptive (cardiac) signals on auditory processing during sleep in healthy volunteers.
Giovanni Chiarion, research fellow
Giovanni obtained his bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Padua, and he pursued his master's degree and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. His master's thesis focused on the development of a pupillometric communication device for patients with ALS. He then delved into Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology, supported by a research grant from the University of Torino, and EEG connectivity metrics as the main topic of his PhD thesis. Currently, Giovanni is interested in the pupillometric correlates of surprise and violation detection in auditory sequences.
Jacinthe Cataldi, research technician
Jacinthe holds a bachelor in neurophysiology techniques. She worked in the lab of Dr Francesca Siclari where she specialized on high-density EEG in human sleep research and serial awakening experimental protocols. Driven by her passion for the investigation of the neural correlates of consciousness experience, Jacinthe had conducted research on sleepwalking episodes, their neural dynamics and their associated conscious experience.
She joined Marzia De Lucia's lab in May 2023, driven by her interest for the scientific investigation of the different state of consciousness (sleep and coma) working on the nerual underpinning of sensory processing in altered states of consciousness using scalp and intracranial recordings.
Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma, PhD student
Sergi completed his master's in neuropsychology in 2023, after which he joined Marzia De Lucia's lab to pursue a PhD in neuroscience motivated by his passion to understand the neural bases of human cognition and consciousness using neuroimaging and deep neural networks (i.e., machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques).
Sergi also holds a bachelor's in computer engineering and a PhD in astrophysics, which he obtained in 2014 under the supervision of Caroline Soubiran at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France. From 2014 to 2017, he worked for the ESA Gaia mission at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland as part of the Stellar Variability group. From 2017 to 2023, he worked for NASA Astrophysics Data System at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge (USA), where he is now a Research Associate.
Affiliated Research Fellows and PhD students
Florian Perrin, PhD student
Florian holds a Master's degree in Cognitive Science from Lyon's Université Lumière. Interested in the big question of consciousness and curious about altered states of consciousness, he completed his master's thesis on the effect of mindfulness meditation on parental burn-out, supervised by Rebecca Shankland of Grenoble University. At the same time, he studied dreams at the Centre de Recherche en Neuroscience de Lyon (CRNL) under the supervision of Perrine Ruby.
He is currently working on his PhD under the supervision of Philippe Ryvlin and Marzia de Lucia, with the aim of studying consciousness at its core. More specifically, his project aims to study body-brain interaction using intracerebral EEG data, and to investigate the interactions of the autonomic nervous system with different states of consciousness.
