My lab investigates the neural computations that mediate adaptive behavioral responses to sensory stimuli. Experimentally we use Drosophila as a genetic model system and combine anatomy, physiology, and modeling to understand odor driven behavior. I was trained as a theoretical physicist before starting research in neurobiology, and I invested the past 10 years to consolidate the expertise of my lab in a vast range of experimental techniques. By combining experimental, quantitative, and theoretical approaches, we address key open questions in neuroscience:

1- How much non-genetic variation is allowed in a sensory pathway? And what it is good for? Here we focus on stochastic variation as well as developmental plasticity driven by environmental factors, like temperature. We want to understand what phenotypic variation in the brain contributes to behavioral individuality and populations success.

2- Which mechanisms mediate the re-evaluation of innate behaviors? Here we focus on neural circuits that use dopaminergic signaling to compute expectations about behavioral outcomes. In the long term, we want to understand how the brain evaluates outcome on multiple timescales during spatial exploration of resources.

3- What does sensory adaptation mean for odor perception? We study molecular and circuit mechanisms that mediate adaptation to odor backgrounds to understand information processing in changing environments. This is a “classic” question in vision and audition, but the computational consequences of adaptation in olfaction are largely unknown.

4- How do gene families and neural circuits co-evolve? In collaboration with Susanne Foitzik (evolution and ecology) and Hugo Darras (evolution and genomics) at JGU, we aim at understanding how cell fate determination of olfactory receptor neurons determines brain wiring and odor information processing in ants. Here we investigate the hypothesis of a non-canonical olfactory system in ants compared to other insects like the fruit fly.

In line with the goals of IQCB and strengthened by the IQCB network, our research is based on an interdisciplinary approach to neurobiology and is fueled by continuous feedback between experimental findings and theoretical models.

Positions held

Since 2019 
Group Leader, Institute of Developmental and Neurobiology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

2017 – 2019 
Research associate, Department of Neurobiology, University of Konstanz, Germany

2014 – 2017 
Postdoc, Department of Neurobiology of Behavior, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

2009 – 2013 
Postdoc, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, USA

Education

2006 –2009 
PhD in Biophysics, Department of Physics, Universita’ La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

1999 – 2004 
Studies in Physics, Universita’ La Sapienza, Rome, Italy