Prof. Francesco Saverio Pavone (PI)
Francesco Saverio Pavone directs a research group in the field of biophotonics on single molecule biophysics, microscopy, imaging-spectroscopy techniques, biomedical imaging, and laser manipulation of bio-samples. He is developing new microscopy techniques for high resolution and high sensitivity imaging, and for laser manipulation purposes. These techniques have been applied both for single molecule biophysics, single cell imaging and optical manipulation. Tissue imaging is another research area developed, where nonlinear optical techniques have been applied for skin and neural tissue imaging also in-vivo. Pavone is author of many international papers and editor of international books. He has more than 100 invited talks and he is editor of international journals. He has been Director of the European Laboratory for Non Linear Spectroscopy in Florence from 2013 to 2019. He coordinates several European and international projects and he has organised several international congresses.
Prof.ssa Elisabetta Cerbai (Co-PI)
Elisabetta Cerbai is Full Professor of Pharmacology, School of Medicine and Surgery, Department of Neurosciences, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health (NEUROFARBA), University of Florence, Italy and Director in charge of the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS). Professor Cerbai has always been a promoter of scientific progress and strongly involved in the growth of academic research and training of young scientists, holding prestigious position as Vice-Rector for Scientific research at University of Florence (2009-2015) and Member of the Health Ministry Advisory Board (2015-2018). Author of quite 200 scientific publications and principal investigator of national and European projects, her research is focused on heart physiology with a multidisciplinary approach, from pharmacology to human stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, from electrophysiology to advanced imaging. Prof. Cerbai is involved in the project since the very beginning as director of LENS. Together with her co-workers and fellows in NEUROFARBA, she is particularly committed to task 14, focused on the brain-heart axis, which represents a “hot” topic receiving increasing attention from a scientific and clinical point of view.
Prof.ssa Maria Michela Del Viva (Co-PI)
Maria Del Viva is Associate professor of Biological Psychology at the department NEUROFARBA of University of Florence. She has been an Associate/Senior Fellow of the Institute for Mind and Biology of University of Chicago (2008-2016), where she has also been a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer (2008- 2009).
Her research activity started out in 1997 with a PhD thesis on non-linear neural mechanisms involved in human visual motion perception at the University of Pisa, and went on to cover a diverse array of multidisciplinary topics. Amongst them, visual, cross-modal and time perception, pattern recognition, information processing, clinical research, neuro-aesthetic, conducted by using a variety of techniques such as computational modelling, psychophysics, psychophysiological recordings in children, adults, elderly, and in clinical populations.
Her activity is carried out in collaboration with national and international researchers from the fields of engineering, physics, neurology, mathematics and art history, and published in international journals. She has received funding as PI and collaborator by Italian and International institutions.
Prof. Paolo Frasconi (Co-PI)
Paolo Frasconi received a PhD from the University of Florence in 1994 with a thesis on recurrent neural networks and graphical models for sequence learning. He was a Visiting Scholar at MIT in 1992, a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong in 1998, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florence where he is currently Full Professor in Artificial Intelligence. He is a Fellow and Program Director of ELLIS, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. He is active since 1990 in the area of machine learning, neural networks and graphical models, both from an algorithmic and an application perspective, with studies on various forms of neural networks for relational learning and applications to bioinformatics, biological images, natural language processing, pattern recognition, medicine, music. He has published over 170 refereed journal and conference papers, 1 book, 4 edited books. He is an Action Editor for Machine Learning Journal and has served as associate editor for several top journals in the field (including Artificial Intelligence Journal and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks) and in several roles for major conferences such as the Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022, Program Associate Chair), the European Conf. on Machine Learning (ECML/PKDD 2016, Program Chair), the 2001 IEEE Int. Conf. on Data Mining (ICDM 2001, Vice Chair).
Prof. Pierangelo Geppetti (Co-PI)
Pierangelo Geppetti (PG) is professor of clinical pharmacology at the medical School of the University of Florence, has been Director of the Department of Health Sciences of the University of Florence and of the Research Department and of the Clinical Unit – Headache Center and Clinical Pharmacology of the University Hospital of Careggi – Florence. PG has been/is editor of the Br J Pharmacol, Physiological Reviews, Pain, Molecular Pain, The Journal of Headache and Pain, Fundamental and Clinical Pharmacology, Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Pain. Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology. PG has been Board member of a variety of national and international scientific societies, and President of the Italian Society for the Study of Headaches. PG started his clinical and research activity at the Headache Centre of the Institute of Internal Medicine of the University of Florence under the guidance of Prof. Federigo Sicuteri and spent three years (1991-1993) of research at the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and the Cardiovascular Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He has been Associate Professor (1998-2002) at the University of Ferrara, where he founded the local Headache Centre. PG studied the mechanisms and treatments of chronic pain, with a special focus on migraine and related primary headaches. To discover new medicines for the treatment of chronic pain he founded two academic spinoff (Pharmeste Srl, University of Ferrara 2003; FloNext Srl, University of Florence 2020). Awarded an ERC-advanced grant (September 2019), PG has authored >430 articles in peer-reviewed journals and >23,000 total citations with an h-Index of 81 (Scopus).
Prof. Renzo Guerrini (Co-PI)
Prof. Renzo Guerrini is Director of the Neuroscience Department at the Meyer Children’s Hospital IRCCS, Florence, Italy, and Full Professor of Child Neuropsychiatry at the Department of Neurosciences, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health (NEUROFARBA), University of Florence. His previous Academic positions include Professorships at the University of Pisa, King’s College London, and University College London. His research focuses on neurophysiology, neurogenetics, and the treatment of pediatric epilepsies. He has coordinated the Commission of Pediatrics of the ILAE and has been the principal investigator of DESIRE (Development and Epilepsy – Strategies for Innovative Research to improve diagnosis, prevention, and treatment in children with difficult to treat Epilepsy), a major EU Research project. He received the Ambassador for Epilepsy ILAE Award in 2003, the American Epilepsy Society’s Clinical Research Recognition Award in 2012, and the Elisa Frauenfelder Prize on Research and Innovation in 2019. He has co-authored over 600 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 12 books. His Official H-Index is 110. He has been invited speaker at more than 500 meetings worldwide.
Prof. Francesco Vanzi (Co-PI)
Francesco Vanzi obtained his masters degree in Biology at the University of Florence in 1994, and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. During his studies he visited the laboratories of Dr. David R. Trentham (NIMR, Mill Hill, London in 1996), Dr. Måns Ehrenberg (Uppsala University, Sweden in 2001) and Dr. Kathleen S. Matthews (Rice University, Houston TX in 2007).
He has been Ricercatore a tempo determinato at INFM (2002-2004) and at the Department of Biology of the University of Florence (2005-2011), then full researcher at the Department of Biology (2012-2017), where he is Associate professor since 2017.
His current research is focussed on functional imaging and electron microscopy applied to the study of zebrafish neuronal activity in normal and pathology model conditions.