I joined the lab in September 2018 as an intern student om 2018, and then continued with a PhD (2019-2025). Before that I did a BA in Philosophy (2014-2017, University of Trento) and a MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience (2017-2018, CIMeC).

Besides scientific research, things in life that I appreciate are: philosophy, learning, open and honest communication, movies (independent/arthouse, electronic music, playing frisbee, mountain hikes, sleeping.

For more information on me and my scientific research, please visit my personal website.

Personal website

General research interests

Currently, my main research focus is to promote the emerging paradigm of in silico neuroscience. In silico neural responses to stimuli generated by encoding models increasingly resemble in vivo responses recorded from real brains, enabling the novel research paradigm of in silico neuroscience. The fast and economical generation of in silico neural responses allows researchers to test more scientific hypotheses and to explore across larger solution spaces than possible in vivo. Crucially, novel findings from large-scale in silico experimentation are then validated through targeted small-scale in vivo data collection, thereby optimizing research resources.

Ongoing research projects

I am developing the Brain Encoding Response Generator (BERG; https://github.com/gifale95/BERG), a resource consisting of diverse pre-trained encoding models of the brain and a Python package to easily generate in silico neural responses to arbitrary visual stimuli. BERG enables researchers to efficiently address a wide range of research questions through in silico visual neuroscience by providing a growing, well documented library of encoding models trained on different neural recording modalities, species, datasets, subjects, and brain areas.

We envision that BERG will empower in silico visual neuroscience, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery. We warmly welcome models, ideas, and collaboration from the computational neuroscience community.

Student supervision & opportunities

If you have similar research interests, good programming skills in Python, an English level of C1 or higher, and strong communication/presentation skills, please get in touch with me: if I see a good fit I would be happy to supervise you for an internship or thesis.