People

Under this section, you'll find all research personnel in the Cognitive Neuroscience group at SISSA, with a brief description of who they are and what they do. Where available, links are also provided to the personal/lab websites.

Faculty Members are full and associate professors in the group, i.e., tenured group leaders who can directly supervise students, recruit staff in their labs, and manage funds. They provide the bulk of the teaching offer in the PhD.

Senior Postdocs are non-tenured, but independent researchers who are recruited in the group to widen our research portfolio with their own investigations. They’re encouraged to liaise with (some of) the PI’s labs; but are expected to maintain independence. They typically don't supervise students independently, and don’t manage research funds directly (unless they have their own external funds, of course). They typically contribute to the teaching offer in the PhD.

Postdocs are non-tenured, research positions to work in one of the PI’s labs. They can be funded internally or through external grants. They don't supervise students independently, and don’t manage research funds directly. If they’re happy to do so, they can contribute to the teaching offer in the PhD.

Students include PhD in our own program; Master in one of the programs that we run in collaboration with partners institutions; and subsidised graduate and postgraduate fellows who run short-term visits to the group, typically in the view of joining our PhD program.


Mojtaba joined SISSA in 2018 and is working with Dr. Chris Mathys. He is interested in statistical learning, Physics of complex systems, collective behaviors, and economics as well as computational psychiatry.
Prior to starting his Ph.D., he obtained a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from Isfahan University of Technology.

I joined Davide Crepaldi's lab as a PhD student in 2022, following an integrated Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. I'm most interested in the study of bilingual populations, through the lens of statistical learning.

Maristella joined SISSA in 2020 and is working with Raffaella Rumiati.

I am a psychologist, with a background in developmental psychological sciences and neuropsychology. I joined the INSULA lab in 2020 as a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Neuroscience under the supervision of Raffaella Rumiati. I have always been interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying mathematics and numerical reasoning in typical and atypical populations.

Yifan joined SISSA in 2018 and is working with Alessandro Treves.

I joined SISSA in 2023 as RTD-A in the Neuroscience & Society Laboratory (iNSuLa). My research interests focuses on the neural correlates of various aspects of emotions, including emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, the interaction with cognitive processes, as well as their expression in complex social contexts and in psychopathological patients.

Paolo joined SISSA in 2019 as a PhD Student and is a member of the Visual Neuroscience Lab leaded by Prof. Davide Zoccolan. His main research interest is investigating the similarities in the neural representation of visual scenes between biological systems (using mice and rat models) and artificial systems (CNNs, ViTs). He loves Fluid Dynamics Simulations.

Valentina is working on projects related to the cognitive and emotional aspects of human sociochemosignal communication.

Research in Eugenio's lab investigates the computational principles that underlie the ability of the animal brain to perform efficient inference and prediction under tight resource constraints. Learn more on the lab website.

Contact: epiasini@sissa.it

Elisabetta joined SISSA in 2019 and completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2023. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral research fellow in Raffaella Rumiati's Neuroscience and Society Lab (iNSuLa).

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