Massimo Silvetti

Massimo Silvetti

Massimo Silvetti completed his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2007 at the Sapienza University of Rome, with a doctoral thesis on computational neuroscience of space representation. After a one-year postdoctoral period at the Neuroimaging Lab of Santa Lucia Foundation (Rome), he worked for eight years at the Ghent Institute for Functional and Metabolic Imaging, and at the Experimental Psychology Department of Ghent University (Belgium), at first as a postdoc and then as researcher. During this period, he started dealing with computational neuroscience and neuroimaging of decision-making. Since May 2020, Dr. Silvetti has been working at the ISTC-CNR as a tenured researcher and co-founded the CTNLab. Currently, his research focuses on how motivation and decision-making are represented and interact in the mammalian brain. This domain of investigation implies studying also how the brain regulates the release of neuromodulators as a function of environmental challenges, and how these neuromodulators influence back the brain functions, and thence behaviour, cognition and emotions. Any malfunction of these mechanisms can lead to the typical symptoms related to major psychiatric disorders, like depression and anxiety.