Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

 

venerdì 25 marzo 2022 alle ore 12:00, 

 

si terrà il seminario pubblico di Jlenia Toppi sulle sue attività di ricerca, in modalità mista: 

 

 

Advances in EEG-based brain networks estimation: from clinical applications to social neuroscience

 

Cognitive neuroscience studies the biological processes that underlie human cognition, especially regarding the relation between brain structures, activity, and cognitive functions. Its purpose is to determine how the brain functions and achieves performance. Cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand the nature of the information processing by which the brain produces the observed behavior. Technologies that measure brain activity, like functional neuroimaging, can provide insight into behavioral observations when behavioral data are insufficient. In this context, the talk has the main objective to describe the methodological framework for connectivity estimation developed in the last 15 years as support to cognitive neuroscience in the comprehension of neural phenomena and brain networks at the basis of human cognition. An overview of how the recent methodological advancements in EEG-based connectivity field have overcome its most restrictive pitfalls will be given. Such advancements have allowed to employ methodologies for brain connectivity estimation as tool to be used in several applications aiming at the comprehension of cognitive or social human behaviors or at the description of pathological neural mechanisms at the basis of severe neurological diseases (stroke, disorders of consciousness, multiple sclerosis).

 

Jlenia Toppi received her M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering from Sapienza University of Rome in 2009 and her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from University of Bologna Alma Mater Studiorum in 2013. She is currently involved in a tenure-track position at the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome since 2019. In the framework of a bilateral agreement between her Department and Fondazione Santa Lucia, an Institute of Hospitalization and Scientific Care, she spend part of her research activity in the latter institution, specialized in Neurorehabilitation. Her research interests include the development and implementation of new approaches for biomedical signal processing, with a special focus on neuroelectrical data (Electroencephalography, EEG) with the aim to reconstruct the brain circuits at the basis of cognitive processes and social cognition in healthy and pathological conditions. She participated in several national and international research projects, also as Principal Investigator, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Italian Ministry of Health, 7th Framework Program and Horizon 2020 of the European Commission. She serves as reviewer for several peer-review journals, she is the Associate Editor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine journals.