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.


Lorenzo's main interests are language, visual spatial attention and cognitive neuroscience of blindness. During his PhD at the University of Salzburg, he worked with different neurocognitive methods to investigate neural underpinnings of visual word recognition. Currently, he is part of a joint project between SISSA and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC).

Valentina is a PhD student working under the supervision of Davide Crepaldi. Her research interests are currently focused on the fundamental cognitive mechanisms underlying reading. Valentina is from Italy; she has a background in Humanities, Neuroscience and Neuropsychology.

Andrea is working under the supervision of Domenica Bueti, in the time perception lab. Andrea received his Bachelor's degree in Psychology and his Master's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology at the University of Bologna. 

Alessandro believes that science is the best tool we have today to explore nature and understand ourselves. His experiments aim to explain a complex phenomenon from the neuronal level to the behavioural one. He is currently investigating multisensory perception in rodents, by employing a novel experimental design which he developed.

Mattia is a postdoc researcher in the Visual Neuroscience Lab directed by Prof. D. Zoccolan, where his main research interests involve the study of complex features development in the visual cortex, with a particular focus on high level areas of the ventral stream, using data obtained by neural recordings in both anesthetized and implanted rats. 

In SISSA, I have worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2021) and a Visiting Scientist (2021 – now) in the lab of Prof. Davide Crepaldi. We ran experiments with adults, children, and non-human animals (rattus norvegicus) to determine which aspects of reading can be attributed to generic properties of the visual system.

Brent Parsons is a post-doctoral fellow in Domenica Bueti's Time Perception Lab. His research investigates how temporal dynamics in the world and in the brain influence perception and action.

Yangwen’s interest is to investigate how does the brain, as an electrical and biological machine, construct and manipulate concepts/thoughts. As a member in the joint project between SISSA and CIMeC, he is trying to unravel the spatiotemporal neural basis underlying linguistic versus perceptual aspects of semantic processing.

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