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.


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.

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.

Visual Neuroscience

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

Tactile Perception and Learning

Research in Diamond’s SISSA Explorations into the Neuronal foundations of Sensory Experience Lab (SENSEx)  is aimed at understanding the neuronal basis of our subjective sensory experiences, through behavioral experiments, electrophysiology, and recently optogenetics. Learn more on the lab website.

Contact: diamond@sissa.it

Theoretical and computational neuroscience

Research in limbo - Liminar Investigations in Memory and Brain Organization - ideally self-organizes around any issue, the hippocampus, Potts models and drifting into language. Learn more on the lab website.

Contact: ale@sissa.it

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.

Pages