Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Professor in Magnetic Resonance Physics
- Neuroinflammation
- UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
- Faculty of Brain Sciences
A bit of history!
I was born in Milan (Italy) in 1969, moved to a little village on the Italian Riviera at 10, called Bonassola, studied Solid State Physics (with the intention to do MR Physics for translational applications to the medical field) at the University of Pavia and then came to the UK with a COMETT grant for post-graduate students.
I did my PhD at the University of Surrey (Guildford, UK) in MR sequence development under the supervision of Simon Doran and David Gilfoyle on developing fast imaging sequences (BURST) collaborating with the University of Lyon (France), the Nathan Kline Institute (USA) and the Institute of Child Health (ICH).
I joined the NMR Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Neurology in January 1999 as a postdoctoral research fellow sponsored by the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society of the UK. I am still here, now as Professor of MR Physics. As such I continue leading quantitative MRI development on the 3T scanner for MS research.
I love my work especially for the translational aspect of it between technical development and clinical applications. I love the international group of people I work with, including several PostDoctoral Fellows from engineering, Physics and computer Sciences and PhD students supervised in collaboration with colleagues from different disciplines.


Research interests:
- Develoment of quantitative MR imaging biomarkers in the Central Nervous System;
- Structural and functional characterization of complex systems;
- Applications to disease (e.g. Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injury);
- Multi-nuclear spectroscopy and imaging;
- Multi-scale architectures for neuroscience.
Research topics:
- Advanced Diffusion Imaging with applications to spinal cord, optic nerve and brain;
- Brain and spinal cord Spectroscopy and Chemical Shift Imaging;
- Brain neuroscience: connectomics and the cerebellum;
- Magnetisation Transfer in the brain, optic nerve and spinal cord;
- Cortical measurements, including thickness and complexity;
- Relaxometry in the central nervous system;
- Functional imaging in the brain and spinal cord;
- Quantitative and functional sodium imaging and spectroscopy.
Courses I am involved:
At the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology I am involved with postgraduate training through the MSC in Advanced Neuroimaging and MSc in Neuroscience courses, as well as through PhD training for students I supervise.
I also teach MR Physics at the University of Pavia (Italy), where I run a lab of MR physics for neuroscience and medical applications.
I have organised several teaching courses for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) on diffusion imaging and quantitative imaging biomarkers.
Every year I co-organise with Prof Egidio D'Angelo the course of the School of Brain Cells and Circuits dedicated to "Camillo Golgi" that we co-funded and direct. This is a prestigious school of the Ettore Majorana Foundation in Erice (Italy).
01-OCT-2015 | Professor of MR Physics | Neuroinflammation | UCL Institute of Neurology, United Kingdom |
1998 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Surrey | |
1994 | Doctor of Science | Universita degli Studi di Pavia |