I am interested in theoretical and computational modeling of the central nervous system in close collaboration with experimentalists. In particular, I model close-loop action-perception systems in order to reproduce the behavior and investigate the lower level mechanisms at play: the single neuron and population coding representation, the mechanisms of  learning and plasticity and the processing of transmission and transformation of the information. Whenever possible, I am also interested in testing the models in realistic situations to validate them using either detailed simulated environment or robotics and prosthetics devices.

 

My research interests include developing theories and models of neural computation, investigate how value and uncertainty are encoded in the central nervous system, study the encoding of probabilities and inference process in neuronal populations, derive theoretical and computational models of spike timing encoding in neuron population, validate modeling with cutaneous tactile spiking data on hand obtained through collaborations, study the dynamical evolution of stimulus representation in spike timing neural populations, and quantify results using information theoretic measures.

 

I expect to pursue to integrate and cross levels of investigations, which have bridged calcium dynamics to neural population and sensorimotor learning in past projects. I plan to validate as much as possible the theoretical approach with modeling of specific neural areas for comparisons with available experimental data.