Speakers

 Elisabetta Palagi

Elisabetta Palagi has been studying primates spanning strepsirrhines and haplorrhines, including monkeys, apes and humans since 1992. Her studies have been carried out under both controlled and wild conditions. She holds a master's degree in biology, a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, and a solid publication record on a wide array of topics bridging sociobiology, psychology, and anthropological sciences. She is one of the Principal Investigators of a Working Group on play (Play as a window into cognitive evolution and the rules of sociality at the University of Tennessee, USA). She works at the Natural History Museum, University of Pisa (Italy).

Among others, she has demonstrated individual recognition in lemurs and their use of multimodal signaling. She has also extensively investigated the functions and evolutionary significance of play, conflict management and resolution in social groups, and the behavioral patterns underlying emotional contagion and empathic abilities of human and nonhuman animals.

Irene Altarelli

Irene Altarelli completed her master at UCL (UK) and then joined Franck Ramus' lab (ENS, Paris) for a PhD on the neuroanatomical bases of learning disabilities (dyslexia). She then moved to Daphne Bavelier's lab as a postdoc, to investigate inter-individual differences in learning and their cognitive determinants in the general population. She is currently based at Neurospin, in Paris, in Stan Dehaene's lab. 

Her main research interests lie in human learning, particularly in what caracterizes successful learners and what positively or negatively impacts learning abilities. She addresses these questions via behavioural and neuroimaging studies in adults and children, using tools such as video games. 

Louk Vanderschuren

Prof. Dr. L.J.M.J. (Louk) Vanderschuren obtained a MSc degree in Medical Biology (1990) and a PhD degree (1994) at Utrecht University. As a post-doctoral fellow, he studied the neurobiology of drug addiction at the VU University Amsterdam and the University of Cambridge. In 2004 he was appointed staff member at the Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience (UMC Utrecht), and in 2010 he was appointed professor of behavioural neuroscience at UtrechtUniversity. Since 2009, he is editor of Behavioural Pharmacology and he is now President Elect of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society.

His research deals with the neural mechanisms of social behavior, impulsive behavior/decision making and addictive behavior. His work includes behavioral paradigms in rodents, pharmacological and chemogenetic manipulation of brain functions and ex vivo brain function assays.

Marcello Solinas

Marcello Solinas is a CNRS Research Director and the leader of the INSERM team « Neurobiology and Neuropharmacology of Addiction » in the Laboratory of Experimental and Clinical Neurosciences in Poitiers. He did his doctoral study in Pharmacy at the University of Cagliari in the laboratory of G. Di Chiara working on the mechanisms underlying behavioral sensitization. He did his post-doc at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore (USA) in the laboratory of Dr. S.R. Goldberg working on cannabinoids and the role of endogenous cannabinoids in addiction and reward processes. Since 2004, he has been working at the University of Poitiers focusing on the mechanisms of relapse to addiction in the attempt to discover new approaches for the treatment of this brain disorder.

Giovanni Vecchiato

 Giovanni Vecchiato achieved his degree in Telecommunication Engineering in Napoli, then, fascinated by the world of the neurosciences, got a PhD in Neurophysiology at Sapienza University in Rome. He worked at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology for 9 years where his work was mainly related to the field of the Applied Neuroscience. His studies were focused on the development of neurophysiological indices to describe cognitive and emotional processes during complex tasks. From one year, Dr. Vecchiato is Senior Post-Doc at the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council of Italy in Parma, and his activity is related to action prediction in driving.     

Domna Banakou

Domna Banakou has obtained her bachelor degree in Computer Science (Informatics) from the Ionian University Corfu, Greece in 2009. Her diploma is specialized in Humanistic and Social Sciences. In 2009-2010 she did a MSc in Computer Graphics, Vision and Imaging, at University College London (UCL). In 2017 she received her PhD degree in Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology from the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain. She’s currently continuing her post-doctoral studies as a member of EVENT-LAb at UB, under the guidance of Prof. Mel Slater.

Her research interest focuses on virtual environments and how people respond to events within these. She is attracted by the idea of simulating social situations that are difficult (or impossible) to realize in physical reality. She is especially interested in the topic of bodily representation within virtual environments, specifically investigating the way the brain represents the body. She is focusing on transformations of the virtual bodily appearance, exploring the perceptual and behavioral correlates of body ownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs.

Jean Daunizeau

In 2005, Jean Daunizeau has obtained a PhD both at the Medical Imaging Research Unit (Paris, France) and at the Mathematics Research Centre (Montréal, Canada). Then he performed a first post-doctoral training at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (FIL, UCL, London, UK), under the supervision of Pr. Karl J. Friston and a second post-doctoral training at the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (Dpt. of Economics, UZH, Zurich, Switzerland), under the supervision of Pr. Klaas E. Stephan. He is currently both a research group leader at ICM (MBB team, Paris, France) and an honorary fellow at ETH (TNU unit, Zurich, Switzerland). And since June 2013, he holds a tenured position at INSERM, France. He is regularly lecturing in highly selective graduate programs (e.g., cogmaster, ENS) and in international training courses (e.g., SPM course, London, UK, or computational psychiatry course, Zurich, Switzerland), some of which he organized (e.g., DCM course, Paris, France). He is (or has been) a member of many editorial boards of journals in the field of Neuroscience.

His field of expertise is computational neuroscience. His research interests include dynamical models of coupled neural ensembles and probabilistic models to study perception, learning and decision making.

He also coordinates the BRAiN’US academic project, which is a smartphone app gathering fun tests designed to decompose social cognition.