Luca Mazzucato              Principal Investigator

Huestis Hall 238
Institute of Neuroscience 
University of Oregon
Eugene
OR 97401
​USA
lmazzuca - at - uoregon - dot - edu
CV

Luca Mazzucato is an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Biology and Mathematics and a Member of the Institute of Neuroscience.

What keeps Dr. Mazzucato awake at night are some pressing questions: 
Which mechanisms underlie associative learning at the level of synaptic plasticity in local cortical circuits?
How does behavior emerge from the temporal dynamics of cortical networks?
What regulates the temporal dynamics of neural circuits?

To study these questions, he deploys methods from statistical physics, information theory, machine learning, and dynamical systems, combining analysis of neurophysiological data from large populations of neurons in behaving animals with theoretical models based on neural networks.

Publications on Google Scholar.

Background
Dr. Mazzucato is a theoretical physicist by training. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at SISSA/ISAS in Trieste, Italy, in 2005 and worked on string theory and beyond the Standard Model physics at the Department of Particle Physics at Tel Aviv University (2005-2008) and as a Visiting Researcher at the Racah Institute of Physics at Hebrew University (2006). He was a Member at the  Simons Center for Geometry and Physics (2008-2011), and a Visiting Scientist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara (2009). He began his neuroscience research in 2012 at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Stony Brook University. He was a Swartz Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology (2013-2014) and, since 2014, a NIH-funded Principal Investigator. He was an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University (2017/2018).