Main
I am a postdoc with a physics background. My main research interests are computational neuroscience and the analysis of electrophysiological data.
Currently I am an EU Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellow (OIF). This fellowship lasts three years and involves an international collaboration between two institutes in the US and in Italy. For the first two years (the outgoing phase) I was at the Institute of Nonlinear Science (INLS, Head: Henry D.I. Abarbanel) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), USA, while for the final year (the reintegration phase) I have returned to the Institute of Complex Systems (ISC, Head: Antonio Politi) within the National Research Council (CNR) in Florence, Italy.
One of my main topics during this fellowship is the development of methods to quantify spike train synchrony. So far this work has lead to the proposal of the bivariate ISI-distance (for two spike trains) along with several extensions to multiple spike trains (for reprints and Matlab Source codes: Source Code).
In the two years before I was an EU Marie Curie intra-european fellow (EIF) at the Institute of Complex Systems (ISC, Head: Antonio Politi) within the National Research Council (CNR) in Florence, Italy. During this time I dealt with simulations of neuronal models under the influence of noise (Research-CR). These simulations were combined with the analysis of single neuron recordings that we got from the INLS lab in San Diego.
Before that I was working at the John von Neumann Institute of Computing (NIC) at the Research Center Juelich, Germany (Head: Peter Grassberger) where I obtained my PhD in physics in 2003 (awarded by the University of Wuppertal, Germany). This work involved both nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear time series analysis, particular attention was paid to the synchronization between two time series (Research-Sync).
During this time I was also associated with the Neurophysics group (Head: Klaus Lehnertz) at the Department of Epilepsy at the University of Bonn, Germany (Head: Christian E. Elger). There I applied methods of nonlinear time series analysis to the EEG of epilepsy patients. The main focus of interest was the prediction of epileptic seizures and its statistical validation (Research-EEG).