I am a neurobiologist and neuroethologist interested in how sensory systems in insects operate. I am currently coordinating an interdisciplinary project to investigate the sublethal effects of pesticides (single compounds and mixtures) on the brain and behaviour of insects. I am particularly interested in non-model species of insect pollinators, such as hoverflies, which I began studying when I joined David O’Carroll’s lab in 2016. I joined the lab to investigate visual acuity and visual processing in insects. Since 2017, I have started studying the impact of modern pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, on these processes.

Ever since my university studies, I have been fascinated by sensory transduction and the neural processing of sensory information. I did my masters in Neurobiology in Pisa, Italy, studying the effect of glaucoma on vertebrate retina ex vivo. During my PhD at the University of Trento, Italy, I joined an interdisciplinary team that integrated neurophysics, chemical ecology and cognitive science. There, supervised by Giorgio Vallortigara and Gianfranco Anfora, I studied the occurrence of olfactory asymmetries in bees using extracellular recordings, in vivo calcium imaging and behavioural essays. Before joining Lund University, I spent one year as a postdoc at the Visual Physiology & Neurobotics Laboratory, led by Steven Wiederman at the University of Adelaide, Australia. There, using in vivo intracellular recording, I studied the detectability threshold of single photoreceptors across different insect species

If you'd like to check out some of my research output, accessible to the general public or featured on news websites: from my PhD work, a brief piece on our article that reveals an asymmetry in how honeybees use their antennae; a 3-minute video where I describe my work on neural asymmetries in the honeybee brain; and from more recent work: on the visual acuity of honeybee foragers.