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Marzia De Lucia, principal investigator

Marzia De Lucia is principal investigator, head of the Brain-Body and Consciousness lab at the Lausanne University Hospital in Lausanne and University of Lausanne and head of the EEG CHUV-UNIL section of the Center for Biomedical Imaging.

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.

Marzia De Lucia's work focuses on the investigation of the neural bases of human cognition in altered states of consciousness, including sleep and coma, the mechanisms underlyling the brain-body interaction and on methods development for the analysis of electrophysiologic signals in humans.

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.

Ilgin Sogut, research associate

Ilgin holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electronics and ICT Engineering from KU Leuven, where he specialized in electronics, artificial intelligence, and software systems. His interest in neuroscience started with a neurotechnology project exploring BCI solutions for patients with locked-in syndrome.

During his master studies, Ilgin worked part time as a Data and AI Engineer, building machine learning solutions and large-scale data pipelines. His master's thesis proposed a novel experimental paradigm for classifying voluntary visual imagery using consumer-grade EEG, proposing new signal processing approaches to address inter-session variability and investigate internally generated sensory representations. The thesis received the highest score in his faculty, and he graduated top of his class with a Magna Cum Laude.

Ilgin joined Dr. Marzia De Lucia's lab as EEG Engineer, where he maintains and develops the lab's EEG infrastructure and supports research involving EEG and multimodal physiological signals. He develops experimental protocols and signal processing methods to improve data acquisition and analysis, with research interests centered on the signal processing of sensory and internally generated (imagined) signals using EEG

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.

Sélima Zahar, research fellow

Sélima holds a Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences and a Master's degree in Bioengineering from EPFL. She completed her Master’s thesis under the supervision of Prof. Carmen Sandi at Nestlé Research, where she developed an approach to evaluate the effects of acute nutritional interventions—such as tryptophan supplementation—on stress responses. Her work involved acquiring and analysing multimodal physiological data, including EEG, ECG, and skin conductance. She implemented data processing and analysis pipelines to assess the sensitivity of these measures to stress conditions and to identify reliable stress bio-indicators.

Following her master’s studies, Sélima pursued a PhD under Prof. Dimitri Van De Ville at EPFL and Nestlé Research, where she developed an fNIRS-based approach to assess the acute effects of dietary components, such as caffeine, on cortical hemodynamics in relation to cognitive function in healthy adults. Her work combined sensitive task paradigms that induced cognitive workload and fatigue with PLS-C multivariate modelling to reveal fNIRS–behaviour relationships, while examining the effects of individual differences (e.g., gender). These patterns were further evaluated in a nutritional context to determine their sensitivity to dietary components and to gain mechanistic insights into how these components influence cortical hemodynamics.

Driven by a strong interest in neurophysiology methods and a deep curiosity about altered states of consciousness, Sélima joined the lab of Dr. Marzia De Lucia. Her work focuses on recording and advanced analysis of simultaneous EEG–fNIRS in both healthy cohorts and comatose patients, with the aim of improving diagnosis and prognosis in disorders of consciousness.

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.

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