Profile

I am from Italy but I moved to Edinburgh with my boyfriend two years ago to pursue my career as a scientist. I love pizza and shortbread equally, and every year for my birthday I bake something to celebrate. I have friends and family all around the world and I try to visit them any time I can.  In my free time I like to watch movies and series or go out for a walk with my camera. My pronouns are she/her.

In my current job I study pictures of baby brains to understand what happens when you are born too early or too small and to try to find out what we can do to make sure you grow healthy anyway. To take pictures of the brain (what we call brain scans) we use a big hollow magnet equipped with a radio. It might sound scary but we do this while babies are asleep and we give them earmuffs to make sure we won’t disturb them!
It is true when they say that a picture is worth a thousand words: there is a lot of information in a brain scan, too much for a person to understand in one look! For this reason I use the help of a computer to understand what is happening in our brains when we are born.
What I do is sometimes called ‘data mining’ because we try to extract new knowledge from big amounts of data. It is a bit like the work of a detective: we collect clues (data) to try to solve a mystery, sometimes we have suspects (hypotheses)  and we have to collect evidence (build models) to prove that our theory is true.