I’m currently (since 2006) an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience group in the Center for Neuroscience part of the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

I have a background in theoretical physics and computational neuroscience, which I acquired during my undergraduate and graduate studies.

In 1994, I got my master degree in Physics at the University of Rome in Italy with a thesis on learning dynamics in competitive networks under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Amit, the sorely missed pioneer in the contamination between theoretical physics and neuroscience.

For my PhD (in 1998) with Dr. Alessandro Treves, I worked on the dynamics of attractor networks of spiking neurons, and on extensions of statistical mechanics based capacity calculations to networks storing continuous attractors, providing a link between the theory of attractor nets and the phenomenon of hippocampal place cells.

This interest in the hippocampus brought me to Tucson, AZ for my post-doc (1999-2003)with Dr. Bruce McNaughton, where I was initiated to experimental neurophysiology, I worked on the interactions between the hippocampus and the neocortex during sleep and on properties of hippocampal place cells

I then moved back to Europe, and spent two years (2004-2005) in the Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l’Action at the Collège de France in Paris, where, in collaboration with the group of Dr. Sidney Wiener I extended my work on the interaction between hippocampus and neocortex. The results of this work are (hopefully) soon to be published.

Here in Amsterdam I am trying to combine my theoretical and experimental inclinations, you can find more on my current research interests here.

I am also quite involved in teaching at the bachelor, master and PhD course levels, in the Universiteit van Amsterdam and in the Graduate School Neuroscience Amsterdam.

Here you can find my full CV (pdf format).