About me
I am from Italy and currently pursuing my PhD in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet while being appointed to the post of Early Stage Researcher 3 in the TOBeATPAIN project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement.
Research description
The overall purpose of my research is to increase the understanding about the mechanisms responsible for the transition from nociceptive pain to nociplastic pain, by assessing osteoarthritis and disc degenerative disease as models of the former, while fibromyalgia as a prototype of the latter.
I am specifically interested in investigating the effects of genetic factors in relation to behavioural/psychophysical measures of pain, cerebral pain processing and functional connectivity (via functional magnetic resonance imaging), brain metabolism (via magnetic resonance spectroscopy), and structural brain connectivity (via diffusion tensor imaging).
Education
Feb. 2019 - ongoing: PhD Student in Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
Oct. 2016 - Oct. 2018: Master's Degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Padua (Italy).
Jul. 2017 - Dec. 2017: Research Traineeship in the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
Jul. 2016: Summer School in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at Vrije University (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
Oct. 2013 - Jul. 2016: Bachelor's Degree in Cognitive Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Padua.
Aug. 2015 - Jan. 2016: Erasmus at Linköping University (Sweden).
Academic honours, awards and prizes
Early Stage Researcher (ESR) Fellowship within the framework of the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITNs).