The main goal of my research is to understand the activity of single neurons and populations of neurons in a region of the brain called the visual cortex. This activity depends not only on visual stimuli, but also on what the rest of the brain is doing. 

The long-term goal is a cohesive understanding of how the brain processes visual information. This goal probably won’t be achieved in my lifetime for the human brain, but for the mouse brain it might.

I come to this work from a foundation in pure visual neuroscience: understanding the visual system as an image processing device. See e.g. the symposia that I organized in 2003, and in 2005. Or watch a 2005 talk delivered at the National Institutes of Health, or at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Or a 2011 talk delivered at Janelia Farm. 

A more complete list of my interests and projects can be found here. Also of possible interest, my collection of failed Neuron covers.

Occasionally I write very brief reviews of recent papers on Faculty of 1000 (requires subscription). Also, of possible interest, see the reviews that others have written about our work. 

Recently I have been closely involved in running the Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting and the 2009 and 2012 workshops on Canonical Neural Computation.  

Some random thoughts about neuroscience and science careers are in this interview. Or on page 9 of this publication. If you can read Italian, you get a bit of a back story here. 

Finally, here are the citations to my work on Google Scholar, and this is where I stand in the big tree. And a recent entry: an interest in robot companions.

Curriculum vitae: 

• 1990, Laurea in Mathematical Physics, University of Rome
• 1995, PhD in Neural Science, New York University
• 1996, Postdoctoral fellow, Northwestern University
• 1997, Research Associate, New York University
• 1998, Oberassistent, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich
• 2000, Assistant Professor (Professeur Boursier SNF), ETH Zurich
• 2002, Scientist, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
• 2005, Senior Scientist, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
• 2007, Professor, University College London