Francesco E. Vaccari is a young researcher at Prof. P.'s team. Factors at the University of Bologna. His activity focuses on basic research in neuroscience, with a focus on the analysis of electrophysiological data from posterior parietal areas, in order to understand the mechanisms underlying motor control. He is actively involved in data collection and laboratory activities. On the data analysis front, he has skills in using dimensionality reduction techniques, clustering algorithms and machine learning, as well as models
statistics. Thanks to these innovative approaches, in recent years it has obtained interesting results regarding the posterior parietal cortex. In this region the neurons show mixed selectivity for much external information, but, nevertheless, the activity of the population as a whole can be traced back to some well-defined neural states very similar to those observed in other cortical areas of the frontal lobe, highlighting strong connections within the fronto-parietal network. Furthermore, the information encoded by the parietal cortex can be extracted and decoded with good
accuracy. Finally, thanks to a data simulation procedure that allows us to know its real underlying structure, it has recently shown that the criteria that are most often used in neuroscience to investigate the complexity of neural data are affected by large biases, proposing the adoption of others used in different fields that have proven to be statistically much more robust. He received his PhD in Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences from the University of Bologna in 2021. Since 2023, he has taught Physiology at the Cesena campus in the Biomedical Engineering course.
