Open positions and latest news

If you're interested in joining our PhD program in Cognitive Neuroscience, take a look at the Cognitive Neuroscience Sector at SISSA! You can find further information on how to apply here. 

FUFFO

In June 2025, Yukti Chopra defended her Ph.D. thesis, One-Back Perceptual Memory Task: Psychophysics, Computational Model, and EEG Correlates. 

Yukti will keep working in the Lab as a postdoc. Congratulations Yukti!

Reply Letter to: The dorsolateral striatum encodes a temporal basis for the organization of behavior  by Alessandro Toso, Sebastian Reinartz and Mathew Diamond has been published in Neuron!

Read the full paper here!

Excited to welcome new Ph.D. student Jiajun Zou! Before arriving, Zou was studying CA1 in behaving rats for his Master's degree in Neurobiology under the supervision of prof. Longnian Lin at East China Normal University in Shanghai.  

Christophe Schülke has been awarded the Bridge Postdoc postdoctoral fellowship!!  Christophe will use novel machine learning and neural networks approaches to investigate the statistical structures that emerge in large neuronal populations during the course of learning. He will work with SENSEx and with Sebastian Goldt, head of the Theory of Neural Networks Group of the SISSA Physics department. While the overall trend is for young investigators with computational expertise to move into the tech world, whether towards established companies or startups, Christophe bucks the trend – we are thrilled to say that we pulled him in from a research scientist position at a major imaging corporation.

Our PI Mathew Diamond presented at:

• Weizmann Institute Department of Brain Sciences on July 9

• an exciting new conference: Cognitive Computational Neuroscience in Boston on August 9

Some of us will be at FENS Forum 2024, taking place June 25th-29th in Vienna, Austria.

If you are interested in knowing more about what we do in the Lab and our recent research projects come see Davide Giana and Maria Ravera at Poster Session 05 - Advancements in Animal Behavioural Studies.

In May 2024, our Ph.D. students had their Progress Reports, an annual examination by the Cognitive Neuroscience faculty, where the advance in the research project of each student is evaluated.

Congratulations to Yukti, Aybüke, Maria, Marlen, and Monica!

In March 2024 we met in Rome for the HFSP-funded project "Memory: from Material to Mind", hosted by Sapienza University. We discussed ideas and proposals with our collaborators Nathan Keim of Pennsylvania State University and neural networks theorist Omri Barak of Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology.  

Learn more about the M2M project on the Funded Projects page!

In March 2024, Lilith Filaferro defended her Master thesis, Behavioural analysis of two vibrotactile tasks in rats and their neural correlates in associative cortices. 

Lilith will keep working in the Lab as a pre-doc. Congratulations Lilith!

Direct Contribution of Sensory Cortex to the Judgment of Stimulus Duration by Sebastian Reinartz & Arash Fassihi, Maria Ravera, Luciano Paz, Francesca Pulecchi, Marco Gigante, Mathew Diamond has been published in Nature Communications!

Read the full paper here!

Read SISSA press release here.  

In February 2024 we had the DELIMIT project kick-off meeting in Padova, where we met our partners Marco Mainardi and Serena Bovetti. We discussed our ideas and proposals for the project, and Davide, Maria, and Marlen presented their research work.

Learn more about DELIMIT on the Funded Projects page!

In December 2023, Davide Giana defended his Ph.D. thesis, Investigation on tactile perception and memory in rats and humans: 

task and species differences within a general framework. 

Davide will keep working in the Lab as a postdoc in collaboration with Cynexo. Congratulations Davide!

In December 2023, Alessandra Orsini defended her Master thesis, How do rats learn to ignore an irrelevant tactile stimulus? 

Congratulations Alessandra!

In December 2023, Zahra Yousefi Darani defended her Ph.D. thesis, Dynamics of the judgment of tactile stimulus intensity under stable and volatile conditions.

Zahra's next position is at the German Primate Center in Göttingen. Congratulations Zahra!

Iacopo Hachen was awarded the "Pedro Lagomarsino de Leon Roig" Prize from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) for the best doctoral thesis in neuroscience. After his PhD with us, he is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (Konstanz, Germany).  

Congratulations Iacopo! 

In Summer 2023, several Lab members presented their work at conferences: 

• Maria Ravera presented Adaptation of rats to a volatile hidden Markov Model for reward collection as a poster at Rovereto Workshop on Cognition and Evolution and as a selected talk at TEX.

• Yukti Chopra presented Exploring the adaptability of perceptual memory through One Back Task as a poster at the Bernstein Conference in Berlin  and ESCBC at Lisboa.

• Marlen Gironimi was awarded best poster at the Rovereto Attention Workshop (RAW), for the work entitled: To act upon or to ignore? Attentional functions in rodent tactile perception.

In June 2023 we had a nice picnic in the sunny Sissa garden to welcome two Lab members' new babies. 

In May 2023, our Ph.D. students had their Progress Reports, an annual examination by the Cognitive Neuroscience faculty, where the advance in the research project of each student is evaluated. We celebrated with a lunch in Osmiza!

Have a look at our recent Review, Tactile cognition in rodents, by Alessandro Toso and Mathew Diamond.

In March 2023, Arianna Cella defended her Master's thesis, Duration perception encoding mechanisms in the auditory and tactile modalities. 

Arianna's next position is as a PhD student in the Department for BioMedical Research at Bern University, Switzerland. Congratulations Arianna!

In December 2022, Iacopo Hachen defended his Ph.D. thesis, The role of sensory history in perceptual processing. 

Iacopo's next position is at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (Konstanz, Germany).  Congratulations Iacopo! 

In November 2022, we hosted our collaborators from Technion and Pennsylvania State University in Trieste, for an interesting and productive 3-day meeting regarding our joint projects.

In September 2022, Mathew Diamond won FameLab Big, a competition where the BIGS of Trieste scientific system were asked to tell a scientific topic or a piece of research in only 3 minutes. Congratulations Mathew!

In July 2022, Maria Ravera and Marlen Gironimi presented their research work with posters and talks at the Barrel Cortex Neuro Symposium at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

In April 2022, we had a fun boat trip in Laguna di Marano. We were shown the beautiful nature and we had a wonderful lunch!

In March 2022, Annachiara Guglietti defended her Master's thesis, Behavioral and neural correlates of serial dependence in two different perceptual discrimination tasks. Congratulations Anna!

In October 2021, Mathew, Francesca, Maria, Davide, and Marco went to Leuven, Belgium, for a hands-on workshop on Neuropixels. They were hosted by Neuro Electronic Research Flanders (NERF).

In April 2021, Lisa Fontana defended her Master's thesis, Trial-by-Trial Sensory Prioritization in Rats: overlapping tactile and acoustic cues . Congratulations Lisa!