Biography

I completed my B.S in Molecular Biology (2010) and his M.Sc. in Neuroscience (2012) at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy. My neuroscience research started with an Armenise-Harvard Summer Fellowship in the Datta lab at Harvard Medical School, and further blossomed during a master thesis in the Ratto Lab at Scuola Normale. I was then awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to complete my doctoral training University College London (2018). At UCL, working under the mentorship of Matteo Carandini, and in collaboration with Kenneth Harris and the Kullmann lab, I pioneered novel strategies to record the function and connectivity of neurons and deployed them to understand the brain mechanisms of vision and of epilepsy. Finally, to transition to independence, I secured a Sir Henry Wellcome fellowship, sponsored by Michael Hausser, focusing on the mechanisms of visual and motor computations both in the neocortex and in the cerebellum.

In 2023, supported by an Armenise-Harvard Career Development Award and by a Human Technopole Early Career Fellowship, I launched the Functional Architecture of Neural Circuits Laboratory, based at the Italian Institute of Technology - Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems.

Biography

I obtained my master’s degree in software engineering at the University of Carthage in Tunisia. I completed my thesis in collaboration with the Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance, wherein I worked on a novel Bayesian methodology for topographic mapping of cognitive models using fMRI. Throughout my career I have accumulated industry experience in computer vision, Big Data pipelines, and cloud production systems. Fundamentally, I am interested in computation beyond the Von Neumann architecture, which includes platforms like quantum computers, neuromorphic computers, and biological neural circuits. Now as a research fellow at the RossiLab in IIT, I aim to investigate how rodent eye movements influence sensory processing in the early visual system.

Biography

I am a second-year M.Sc. student in Modeling for Neuronal and Cognitive Systems at Université Côte d’Azur. I became interested in AI during my undergrad in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, initially drawn to machine learning as a way to understand intelligence. Over time I discovered Neuro-AI and my interests shifted toward neuroscience, where biological circuits provide a grounded way to study computation and cognition. I am broadly interested in how neural circuits give rise to behaviour, memory, and adaptive decision-making, and in combining experimental measurements with quantitative modeling. My interests sit at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, especially population dynamics, circuit organization, and dendritic computations that shape neural computation.