My interests are in Cognitive Neuroscience. My background is in Physics and Computational Neuroscience.

For a thesis towards a Laurea in Physics (eq. to a Master Sci.) at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", I studied with Daniel Amit on models of working memory based on persistent activitiy in populations of spiking neurons, using the tools of mean field theory.

I then did a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at the University of Bern with Walter Senn and Stefano Fusi. Together with Alex Rauch, we provided the first experimental demonstration that neocortical neurons respond as integrate-and-fire neurons to "in vivo-like" input current, a central tenet of the theory developed in Rome.

After my Ph.D. I moved to the NIH in Bethesda, US, to work with Barry Richmond. We demostrated the violation of the principle of invariance in monkeys performing visually-cued reinforcement schedules, a result at variance with standard theories of Reinforcement Learning. We introduced and studied a model which accounts for the observed behavior. I then started my own experimental investigation on rapid learning and abstract concept formation in monkeys, showing that monkeys can spontaneously learn to perform a delayed-matching to sample in ~3 days as opposed to the months required in more traditional implementation of such a task.

In 2008 I moved back to the University of Bern to work with Walter Senn on the origin of this fast learning in the context of Reinforcement Learning in populations of spiking neurons.