Paolo joined SISSA in 2019 as a PhD Student and was 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).
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.
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).
Research in Neuroscience & Society Laboratory (iNSuLa) is aimed at understanding the cognitive and non-cognitive factors that influence educational attainment of high school and university students. A related research program concerns the neurocognitive individual differences of brain tumor patients and of normal and pathological ageing individuals. Learn more on the lab website.
Contact: rumiati@sissa.it
Claudia joined SISSA as a PhD student in 2021 and is a member of the Language, Learning and Reading Lab leaded by Prof. Davide Crepaldi.
I come from Croatia, where I obtained my M.Sc. in Psychology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in 2018. I then moved to Slovenia, Koper, where I studied Biopsychology at the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies, University of Primorska, and got interested in Neuroscience.
Cognitive neuroscience research can take advantage of several methods to investigate human behavior and the underlying brain processes. The increasingly complex methods impose a fast pace to be updated with the refirement of established techniques and with new methodological improvements for data collection and analysis.
My research focuses on implementing and developing new methods in support of the scientific research programs carried out at the SISSA, with a particular focus to TMS, EEG, and fMRI. I am also interested in multi-modal approaches (i.e., TMS-EEG co-registration) to offer new tools and prospects in cognitive neuroscience.
As a key part of my role, I manage the human laboratories of the Neuroscience sector and assist the Cognitive Neuroscience groups with experimental design, data analysis and Matlab programming.
Davide Zoccolan’s Visual Neuroscience Lab investigates the neuronal processing of visual information, using a combination of psychophysics and multi-unit neuronal recordings in rodents, as well as computational modeling and machine learning. Learn more on the lab website.
Contact: zoccolan@sissa.it
