Valeria Fascianelli, Ph.D.

I am a physicist by training and currently a postdoctoral researcher in computational neuroscience in Stefano Fusi’s lab at Columbia University, New York.

I collaborate closely with experimentalists to understand neural mechanisms and computational principles of cognitive processes, such as decision-making, and to characterize emotional states.

In my postdoctoral work, I have been developing a representational geometry framework to uncover individual cognitive strategies in primate prefrontal cortex, probe decision-making computations in cerebellar Purkinje cells, and characterize internal states following stress events in the amygdala and hippocampus.

I build interpretable, data-driven models using machine learning, dynamical systems modeling, and decoding analyses to understand how the geometry of neural activity shapes behavior.

Previously, during my Ph.D. in Neuroscience, I quantified intrinsic neural timescales across cortical areas, and the basal ganglia to reveal how slow and fast dynamics support distinct computations. Before transitioning into neuroscience, I earned a B.Sc. in physics and an M.Sc. in particle physics and I worked at CERN on rare K⁺ meson decays and heavy-neutrino searches—running Monte Carlo simulations and developing real-time trigger algorithms.