Biography

I am a Neurologist that has trained at the interface between Neurology and Psychiatry through the field of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Historically, the boundaries across all of these disciplines have been fluid, and this remains the case nowadays.

I study two key issues in Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: (a) what is the brain basis of individual differences in emotional traits (e.g., impulsivity, neuroticism, aggression)? (b) which brain changes are responsible for emotional and behavioral disorders (e.g. pathological aggression)? To answer these questions, I rely upon a set of professional skills that include: (1) advanced analyses of functional and structural brain imaging data (e.g., functional and anatomical connectivity approaches); (2) clinical assessments of patients with neuropsychiatric disorders (i.e., psychiatric diagnostic interviews, neurological assessments); (3) experimental psychology techniques (e.g., task design, analyses of error patterns); (4) dietary and pharmacological manipulations of neurochemical systems (e.g., acute tryptophan depletion, dopaminergic and noradrenergic challenges); (5) molecular genetics methods (e.g., analysis of gene polymorphisms, linkage analyses).