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 Associate Professor at the Departments of Biology, Mathematics, and Physics, and a Member of the Institute of Neuroscience at University of Oregon.

What keeps Dr. Mazzucato awake at night are some pressing questions: 
How does complex behavior emerge from the coordinated activity of neural circuits?
How do neural circuits flexibly change their dynamics to optimize their function?
Can we build new brain-computer interfaces that read out and evoke activity at the same time? 

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).