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.


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.  

Kwang Il joined SISSA in 2019 and is working with Alessandro Treves.

I have been in SISSA since May 2022.
After my PhD in Industrial Biotechnology, I started this new adventure in the field of visual neuroscience, and now I work in Professor Davide Zoccolan's group.

Olga holds BA and MA degrees in Languages and Literature from the University of Belgrade, and an MA in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Trieste. She joined Davide’s lab first in 2018 for a predoctoral internship, and then in 2019 as a Ph.D. student.

I come from Croatia, where I obtained my M.Sc.

I joined Sissa in 2022 and I am a second year PhD studentin the Cognitive Neuroscience group. My work focuses on the learning dynamics of neural networks with biological plausibile learning algorithms, and their application to neural population codes.

Complex systems and Computational Neuroscience

Aline Viol is a physicist with expertise in complex systems and computational neuroscience.

She is interested in decoding and modeling higher cognitive functions by combining approaches ranging from complex brain networks to natural language processing.
She joined SISSA in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher at LIMBO to work on the mind-wandering project.

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.

Mattia joined SISSA in 2018 and is working with Davide Zoccolan.

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