Attività di Ricerca

I am a biologist with postgraduate training in neuroimaging and neuropsychology gained during my PhD at Ruhr University Bochum (Bochum, Germany) and my postdoc at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (Italy). My PhD was supported by a Marie Curie Early Stage Training fellowship and by further educational programs within the RUB Research School and the DAAD. Since 2013, I am assistant professor at UNIBA in the Psychiatric Neuroscience Group. During my assistant professorship, I integrated my research training in neuroimaging with data mining of transcriptome- and genome-wide databases.

Our group has been the first to use the individual genetic background to index gene co-expression in the brain, so that we could infer, based on genetics, the tendency to overexpress or downregulate clusters of genes. We have applied this approach to the DRD2 gene coding for the D2 dopamine receptor, which is involved in SCZ risk and treatment (Pergola et al., 2017 Tranlastional Psychiatry). This work was featured in a dedicated editorial of Science Translational Medicine (http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/376/eaam6059.full).

I have been teaching neuroscience courses in several Degrees with diverse focuses and settings, from undergraduate to residents at UNIBA. My teaching work focuses on exploring translational approaches across multiple biological scales. Our learning is often organized in terms of biological levels – I work towards enabling students to think across layers of knowledge, and this is also an effort I undertake in my own research work, because I strongly believe in learning through knowledge exchange. Over the next years, I plan to study what makes humans differ from one another by studying behavioral patterns, neuroimaging phenotypes, and molecular profiles along neural development.